title: Use of Self-Organizing Maps for Balanced Scorecard analysis to monitor the performance of dialysis clinic chains.
abstract: The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a validated tool to monitor enterprise performances against specific objectives. Through the choice and the evaluation of strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), it provides a measure of the past company's outcome and allows planning future managerial strategies. The Fresenius Medical Care (FME) BSC makes use of 30 KPIs for a continuous quality improvement strategy within its dialysis clinics. Each KPI is monthly associated to a score that summarizes the clinic efficiency for that month. Standard statistical methods are currently used to analyze the BSC data and to give a comprehensive view of the corporate improvements to the top management. We herein propose the Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) as an innovative approach to extrapolate information from the FME BSC data and to present it in an easy-readable informative form. A SOM is a computational technique that allows projecting high-dimensional datasets to a  two-dimensional space (map), thus providing a compressed representation. The SOM unsupervised (self-organizing) training procedure results in a map that preserves similarity relations existing in the original dataset; in this way, the information contained in the high-dimensional space can be more easily visualized and understood. The present work demonstrates the effectiveness of the SOM approach in extracting useful information from the 30-dimensional BSC dataset: indeed, SOMs enabled both to highlight expected relationships between the KPIs and to uncover results not predictable with traditional analyses. Hence we suggest SOMs as a reliable complementary approach to the standard methods for BSC interpretation.
authors.affiliation: Fresenius Medical Care, Bad Homburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Isabella
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Cattinelli
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bolzoni
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Barbieri
authors.forename: Flavio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mari
authors.forename: José David
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Martin-Guerrero
authors.forename: Emilio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Soria-Olivas
authors.forename: José Maria
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Martinez-Martinez
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gomez-Sanchis
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Amato
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stopper
authors.forename: Emanuele
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gatti
mesh_terms: D000554:Ambulatory Care Facilities / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006435:Renal Dialysis
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