Accreditation to require benchmarking
Accreditation to require benchmarking
When staff at St. John Surgery Center in St. Clair Shores, MI, wanted to see how they compared with similar same-day surgery programs in terms of cost, resource management, and processes, they contracted with a company that was able to provide a national database with the information they needed.
National benchmarking studies can be costly and time-consuming to set up on a facility-by-facility basis, so many ambulatory surgery programs are not able to participate on a regular, ongoing basis, says John E. Burke, executive director of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) in Skokie, IL.
Because one of the 1999 accreditation standards of AAAHC is that a facility have "a process to compare key indicators through the use of a standardized data set, the AAAHC is setting up a performance measurement project that will give ambulatory health facilities access to a reasonably priced benchmarking service, says Burke.
AAAHC’s study will enable comparison of similar facilities, produce physician profiles and gather information that can be as detailed as drape utilization, says Girard F. Senn, consultant and project manager for the AAAHC performance measurement initiative. "We are now in the first phase of testing the system and will begin producing reports in August 1999," he says. "Initially we will focus on ambulatory surgery and college health facilities, then we’ll expand the project to include the wide range of other types of health care settings we accredit," adds Burke.
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