Performance indicators: healthcare professionals’ views

The purpose of this paper is to capture factors behind professional views of indicator usefulness as a common structure for assessing healthcare performance and their important characteristics to design limited key performance indicators (PIs) for holistic hospital management.

Two surveys were conducted using self-administered questionnaires, in which hospital manager/staff respondents were asked to rate the 52 PIs’ usefulness. In total, 228 manager and 894 staff responses were collected.

Eight factors were elicited from manager and staff responses as performance measures with 72 percent cumulative variance accounted for. Hospital managers and staff showed similar performance measure perceptions: high-utility acknowledgment on safety, operational efficiency and patient/employee satisfaction but relatively low-employee development concerns. Manager indicator usefulness perceptions were rather homogeneous and significantly higher than staff for almost all performance measures.

Homogeneous manager views mean that a single key PI set for hospital management may be established regardless of hospital attributes. The following aspects may be measures that should be managed in a healthcare organization based on their key PIs: patient/employee safety, operational efficiency, financial effectiveness and patient/employee satisfaction.

This is a pilot study on hospital management PIs in Japan. The eight-dimensional factor structure and findings about healthcare provider perceptions may be useful for healthcare management.