Balance Scorecard in Health Care Organizations Essay

Balanced scorecard is a methodological tool that businesses use to get a measure by which someone can determine whether the set goals have been met or exceeded. It adds non-financial metrics to traditional financial metrics to give a well-rounded view of the performance in an organization. Balanced scorecards also help organizations to predict their success in meeting their overall strategic goals.

Brennan’s balanced scorecard was created based on a nation-state-city metaphor and measured patient satisfaction, the cost, quality and cycle times of clinical and administrative processes, with financials consisting of only 10% of measures.

Using these measures, a hospital can understand where they stand among other hospitals in terms of providing quality care. This can help them to improve quality of care and also understand competitive advantage. The hospitals can find out whether they have the desired percentage and then compare its position with respect to other hospitals or hospital state average and national average (hospital). A lower percentage can help them to do a root cause analysis and help them in improving their percentage by adopting to strategies that will benefit them. An above average and good percentage will encourage and motivate them to achieve stability. The comparison is made not only on the basis of medical condition but also on wide range of categories like complications, Readmissions and deaths, payment and value of care etc. This

The purpose of this paper is to discuss my organization’s model of health care performance, quality assessment, and management. Improving the quality of health care in the United States is necessary (Sherwood & Zomorodi, 2014). According to Huber (2014), based on measurable criteria, health care quality is knowing whether care resulted in expected clinic outcomes. Health care quality and safety are part of Saint Mary’s Medical Center’s mission, vision and culture. For instance, the organization’s vision statement includes “delivering high-quality health care services in compliance with all applicable rules, regulations, and standards,” which calls for system-wide quality improvement (SMMC, 2016). Furthermore, the organization stresses that all employees are responsible for identifying opportunities for improvement (SMMC, 2015). Moreover, it is important to note, nurses are bound by their Code of Ethics to protect the health and safety of patients (Huber, 2014).

At the management level, there was a decision to design the balanced scorecard. The design adopted the three steps of rapid-fire approach as noted by Jon Meliones et.al to be "get connected, get results and get smarter". These were the three guidelines that the top management used to design the balances scorecard and get the hospital out of the problems that it was facing by 1996.

Another perspective of balanced scorecard is learn and growth. For healthcare industries, health providers must have sufficient knowledge within their specialty to provide safe and efficient services to patients. The primary objective for patients care is the quality of interventions and procedures provided to reach desirable outcomes. In addition, training and development for staff is required to ensure safe and effective work environment. Lastly, the workforce should be evaluated to address any deficiencies and morale of employees.

In terms of addressing the issue using a balanced Scorecard, this section provides an overarching suggestion for the hospital. Activity-based costing (ABC) methods would provide greater value to Health Smart concerning the balanced score card (BSC). The value includes comprehensive decision support and extra performance measures, for which ABC is the sole reliable source (Cooper & Kaplan, 1991). This activity data offers support solutions and basic business processes, which is useful in the decision making process. Also, This suggests that HealthSmart must shift from the certainly controlled decision

The BSC, developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, has become a popular management tool for Performance, Management since 1990 s. Adoption of it became main stream amongst many industries quickly, however, the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt them. The healthcare organizations had to face some issues in adopting the BSC to their industry like cost structure, competition, payor hurdles, increasing demand for qualitative treatments, shortage of talented specialists, which forces them to balance cost versus patient outcomes. Key to overcoming these issues is utilizing innovative approaches for performance and performance measurements, such as BSC. By the end of this report, you will be able to see how the BSC has

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the usefulness of the Balanced Scorecard in improving a hospital's management and delivery of health care at reduced cost without loss of quality. This paper describes an approach to designing and implementing a balanced scorecard system for measuring performance and productivity in a hospital setting. Specific measures of performance criteria are suggested as well as interpreted. Guidelines for measuring productivity are also suggested and interpreted. How these measures may be used by a hospital to improve its administration of health care while reducing costs and maintaining quality are described. This paper

Organisations, in order to increase performance, profitability, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage, will benefit from a good strategic performance measurement system to ensure that lower-level managers are acting in a way that is consistent with top managers’ goals and whole organisation’s strategy. One the dominant system is the balanced scorecard framework (Hill, Jones & Schilling, 2015, p.376). The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is defined as “a tool that translates an organisation’s mission, objectives and strategies into performance measures. It is used to implement strategy and to monitor and manage performance, and may form part of the organisation’s planning cycle” (Smith et al, 2015, p.621). The BSC allows managers to look at an organisation from four important perspectives, financial, customer, internal business, and employee learning and growth, which are critical for running the organisation and creating value (Smith et al, 2015, p.621).

The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic performance management framework that has been designed to help an organisation monitor its performance and manage the execution of its strategy. Kaplan and Norton (1996a, 1996b) pointed out that the implementation of the Balance Score Card is to attain the following goals clarify and translate vision and strategy, communicate and link objectives and measures, plan, set targets, and align strategic initiatives; and enhance strategic feedback and learning.

According to Kaplan R. S. & Norton D. P. (1996), the balance scorecard enhances the traditional financial measures with standards for performance in three non-financial areas like relationship between company and customer, internal business process and, learning and growth. It will assist the company to coordinate its’ operation and ensure all businesses activities parallel to the company’s strategies. The balance scorecard consists of four processes that combine short-term activities to long-term objectives. These processes include translating the vision, communicating and linking, business planning and, feedback and learning.

It was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (HBS) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more 'balanced' view of organizational performance. The balanced scorecard has evolved from its early use as a simple performance measurement framework to a full strategic planning and management system. The “new” balanced scorecard transforms an organization’s strategic plan from an attractive but passive document into the "marching orders" for the organization on a daily basis. BSC provides feedback around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. The BSC suggests that we view the organization from four perspectives, and to develop metrics, collect data and analyze it relative to each of these perspectives:

“Balance Scorecard is a flexible, not a narrow model, approving various organization to identify key performance pointers that support their strategy”. It is applied to every sector of organisation, rather public or private, to align for people, planning and task performs.

Abstract: Currently, there is a great interest in performance measurement with many companies attempting to implement the balanced scorecard. However, there is also evidence that many of these implementations are not successful. This paper reviews the different performance