Physician Practice Ratings: Essentials of a Balanced Scorecard
by Jerry Stone
Recently a business partner of MedicalGPS mentioned that he had a large group of hospital-owned physician practices needing help developing and deploying a balanced scorecard. After becoming familiar with MedicalGPS' full array of measurement tools, our business partner learned first-hand the depth and breadth of MedicalGPS' capability to deliver a set of balanced key performance measures to physicians and other healthcare decision makers. For more than a decade MedicalGPS has been, and continues to be the physician's advocate when it comes to measuring and rating practice performance, always emphasizing balanced, when developing balanced scorecards. We have discovered three essential veins of information are required in order to have a truly balanced scorecard; 1) patient feedback, 2) clinical quality, and 3) financial performance. Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations, especially insurance carriers, have placed too much focus on financial performance often neglecting, and sometimes completely ignoring the other two essentials of clinical quality and patient perceptions.
On April 1, 2008 the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project reached consensus regarding certain guiding principles as efforts move forward to improve and standardize physician-rating programs across the nation. In an article published in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Uniform Doctor Ratings Sought”, By Heather Won Tesoriero, the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project was described, in part, as:
“The initiative aims to streamline aspects of health-insurer programs that guide patients by rating doctors -- using a star-ranking system, for example, or identifying "high performance" practitioners. An important goal is to inject greater transparency and consistency into performance measures, so all measurement information will be publicly available.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120706217232480477.html |
MedicalGPS is the physician's advocate when it comes to measuring and rating practice performance, including; capturing real-time patient feedback, benchmarking clinical quality, and delivering financial indicators. All of MedicalGPS' measurement systems have evolved through years of extensive collaboration with practicing physicians, as well as healthcare executives. The result -- an affordable and effective suite of web based reporting tools, delivering a balanced set of metrics to physicians and physician organizations, providing the information needed to prosper in today's rapidly changing healthcare environment.
To learn more, please visit us on-line at www.medicalgps.com, or contact Jerry Stone at
(615) 467-6338 or E-mail: jerry@medicalgps.com. We'd be honored to serve you and your physician colleagues.