PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTH CARE

The drive to improve the quality of healthcare performance has been a consistent theme for several decades. Performance managing the health and social care system helps involve staff in raising standards and ultimately provide taxpayers with proof of progress in areas that matter most to them.

In today's fast-changing healthcare sector, decision-makers are in greater demand for both Clinical and administrative information to comply with legal and consumer specifications Requirements. Thus, performance management (PM) is becoming more and more important with increasing information requests. However, there is not much knowledge about the use of PM in health care.

Public sector organizations are differentiated in comparison with their commercial counterparts in the private sector. “There is no profit maximizing focus, little potential for income generation and, generally speaking, no bottom line against which performance can ultimately be measured”

Performance management defined

 Performance Management has been defined as: 'a process which contributes to the effective management of individuals and teams in order to achieve high levels of organizational performance. As such, it establishes a shared understanding about what is to be achieved and an approach to leading and developing people which will ensure that it is achieved' (Armstrong & Baron, 2002).

Performance management in health care is not only aiming at the systematic generation and control of an organization’s economic value but also at the optimization of the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. Therefore PM, like other management approaches only can be implemented successfully, if strategic planning is closely linked to operational execution and controlling.

Aims of performance management

Performance management is a means of getting better results by providing the means for individuals to perform well within an agreed framework of planned goals, standards and competency requirements.

Impact of performance management

According to the Armstrong Performance management is expected to improve organizational performance, generally by creating a performance culture in which the achievement of high performance is a way of life.

Introducing performance management

The programmed for introducing performance management should take into account that one of the main reasons, why it fails, is that either line managers are not interested, or they don’t have the skills or both. The demanding skills of concluding performance agreements, setting objectives, assessing performance, giving feedback and coaching need to be developed by formal training supplemented by coaching and the use of mentors.

Performance management issues

As a human process, performance management can promise more than it achieves. However well designed a performance management system is, its effectiveness mainly depends on the commitment and skills of line managers. But that success is based on the following facts.

Requirements for success (Armstrong,2013)

● More performance management training;

 ● emphasis on employee recognition;

● the corporate culture emphasizes the importance of performance and values engagement;

● performance management is strategically integrated with human resource management and the business plans of the organization;

● a positive employee relations climate

 

performance management is becoming increasingly relevant for the health care sector, we wanted to know what the current state of PM adoption is and how health care organizations will develop their PM in the future. 

According to this, potential areas where performance in health care can be measured are

              

• ·       Health care financial strength (economy): Revenue optimization, productivity improvement, streamlining claims processing, waste and cost control, activity-based costing.
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• ·       Health care operations (economy): Partner management and measurement, collaboration opportunities, agility improvement, working capital, and asset management.
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• ·       Health care people development (efficiency): Provider experience measurement, provider loyalty and the voice of the provider analysis, learning and growth measures, innovation, knowledge, culture, and intangible value analytics.
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• ·       Patient service and satisfaction (effectiveness): Including patient experience, engagement, delight, loyalty, and relationship measurement, as well as the most important of all – measuring and tracking the voice of the patient.
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• ·       Health care marketing (effectiveness): Measuring and developing the growing importance of healthcare branding, reputation and trust management, patient/customer segmentation, patient profitability, and patient lifetime value.

 

Conclusions

In today's fast-changing healthcare sector, decision-makers are in greater demand for both Clinical and administrative information to comply with legal and consumer specifications Requirements. Thus, performance management (PM) is becoming more and more important With increasing information requests. However, there is not much knowledge about the use of PM in health care.

 

Reference

•        Armstrong M, Baron A.  Performance Management: new realities.  Institute of Personnel and Development: London, 1998.

•        Armstrong,2013, Handbook Of Human Resource Management Practice,

•        Amaratunga, D., Baldry, D., Moving from Performance Measurement to Performance Management, In: Facilities.