Developing Strategic Health Care Key Performance Indicators: A Case Study on a Tertiary Care Hospital

OBJECTIVE:The main objective is to describe in details the complete process of developing a group of strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and improve the performance of a tertiary care hospital, including different services. This project aimed at centralizing and standardizing KPIs to provide higher management with information and support evidence based strategic decision making. METHODS: The researchers used qualitative survey methods through conducting semi-structured interviews with higher management officers as well as hospital department heads and performance professionals. Suggested KPIs were validated against published research then categorized and sorted into ten groups of indicators and finally were approved by the higher management. RESULTS: Fifty eight KPIs could be identified then sorted into ten categories; Patient Access Indicators, Inpatient Utilization, Outpatient Utilization, OR Utilization, ER Utilization, Generic Utilization, Patient Safety, Infection Control, Documentation Compliance, and Patient Satisfaction Indicators. DISCUSSION: Each of these KPIs, and each of the ten categories, has specific value(s); some reflects the effectiveness or efficiency of healthcare provision, such as re-admission rate and average length of stay, some reflects timeliness, such as waiting time for admission, for an outpatient appointment or in the emergency room, and some reflects safety and patient centeredness, such as infection rates and mortality rates. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Before considering these KPIs reliable and comprehensive, they have to be validated against other sources of data, alarming triggers should be set up and future expansions should be planned, to include more related indicators or provide the users with ability to drill down to a lower level of details.