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Benchmarking Productivity in Nursing

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Benchmarking Productivity in Nursing is Useful Benchmarking is a quality improvement tool that determines who the best is, who sets the standard, and what the standard is. There are two main purposes for benchmarking. The first is to identify best practices to be applied in measuring and improving performance in an organization. The second purpose is to seek ways to improve the delivery of service through the efficient use of staff. For health care managers who are responsible for a variable expense cost center or department, maintaining appropriate levels of productivity is one of the greatest and ongoing challenges of the management process and requires constant research and advice regarding relevant productivity standards. Comparing one’s departmental operations with other successful operations of another organization is a useful source of benchmarking data and many health care managers depend on associates or outside consultants to provide data to assist in implementing new and effective strategies to improve staff productivity. There are three sources of productivity standards. The first source is internally developed historical standards where standards are based on past performances but do not provide information about relative efficiency. The second source is engineered standards where internal staff or outside consultants conduct a study of the work environment and define normal standards of productivity. The third source is a comparative group standard where associations or private firms that represent the health care firm provide comparative group standards from collected survey data. Most health care managers today rely on outside consultant firms such as the American Hospital Association (AHA), the Healthcare Financial Management Association (hfma), the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), or the Applied Management Systems

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