Benchmarking is “comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies’." It’s a time-honored practice and adds value by indicating how you stack up against your peers and competitors. Benchmarking can tell you if similar processes take your organization longer or use more resources. Do patients wait longer at your facility than at similar facilities? How do your costs compare? Benchmarking aims to provide answers, but healthcare benchmarking often leads to more questions and, frequently, headaches.

Traditional benchmarking does not empower healthcare organizations to discover why they may be lagging in one indicator or another, or how to elevate their performance.

Most benchmarking tools fail due to three major flaws:

  • Outdated comparative data, which show issues long after you can impact them, skew findings and suggest issues where there are none, or mask others
  • Limited data for comparison, which produces narrow results that aren’t actionable
  • Data not normalized to organization definitions, so data can’t be properly analyzed to guide action

Comparative analysis provides a superior alternative to traditional benchmarking by filling in these gaps and offering a more accurate view of performance using near real-time data across a breadth of parameters—such as revenue, expense, labor, volume, and financial health.

Hospitals and health systems that replace outdated, labor-intensive benchmarking processes with comparative analysis enjoy a more complete view of their competitive position and organizational health, as well as insights on how to improve performance.

 

Axiom Comparative Analytics makes the difference

Axiom™ Comparative Analytics provides broad, deep, real-time data in areas ranging from reimbursement rates to staffing ratios, to non-labor indicators, and hospital-wide performance metrics. It then provides the analytical tools to link that information to deep data from across your own organization.

Imagine analyzing financial, payroll and utilization metric comparisons of both your own organization’s data as well as peer organizations. You’ll not only see how you compare department to department, institution to institution—right now—you’ll see why you compare as you do. You’ll examine labor usage, reimbursement rates, facilities usage, and more for the intelligence you need to consistently improve performance. You’ll have the power to diagnose and intervene in real-time, seize potential performance opportunities, and benefit from analysis and insights powered by advanced analytics and machine learning.

For instance, if you notice an uptick in inpatient admissions, you might benchmark against your admissions over time to determine if it’s a trend. You might also compare with other local hospitals to see if the uptick is widespread and ongoing. If you determine there’s a trend, Comparative Analytics can indicate how the trend is impacting your own entities and departments and help you determine whether you’re staffed, supplied, and/or reimbursed appropriately for the change using the most granular level of detail available on the market.

 

You need more than benchmarking

Benchmarking has value, but it’s too often limited by old data, incomparability, and lack of analytical readiness. Axiom Comparative Analytics not only provides real-time, normalized data on similar healthcare organizations across a broad array of parameters, but it also provides deep information from across your own organization. Finally, advanced analytics draw real intelligence from both internal and external data. The result is actionable intelligence and improved decision-making.

 

Learn more about Axiom Comparative Analytics