The balanced scorecard: an integrative approach to performance evaluation.
In addition to strict financial outcomes, healthcare financial managers should assess intangible assets that affect the organization's bottom line, such as clinical processes, staff skills, and patient satisfaction and loyalty. The balanced scorecard, coupled with data-warehousing capabilities, offers a way to measure an organization's performance against its strategic objectives while focusing on building capabilities to achieve these objectives. The balanced scorecard examines performance related to finance, human resources, internal processes, and customers. Because the balanced scorecard requires substantial amounts of data, it is a necessity to establish an organizational data warehouse of clinical, operational, and financial data that can be used in decision support. Because it presents indicators that managers and staff can influence directly by their actions, the balanced-scorecard approach to performance measurement encourages behavioral changes aimed at achieving corporate strategies.
Oliveira
J
J
Health Care Consulting Group, Kurt Salmon Associates, New York, New York, USA. joliveira@kurtsalmon.com
D019985:Benchmarking; D003628:Database Management Systems; D005377:Financial Management, Hospital / Q000379:methods*; D007253:Information Centers; D008330:Management Audit; D008389:Marketing of Health Services; D009937:Organizational Objectives; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D010559:Personnel Management / Q000592:standards; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D017749:Total Quality Management / Q000379:methods*; D014481:United States