Kaufman Hall conducted an analysis of hospital performance data for 1,300 hospitals across the U.S. and paired findings with organizational structure to understand the impact of management.
“The findings demonstrate that organizations with top financial performance have departmental results that look like a normal curve around the median,” said Kenneth Kaufman and Erik Swanson, managing directors of Kaufman Hall, in an online post. “Said more simply, in top-performing hospitals the number of lower-performing departments is roughly equal to the number of higher-performing departments, with most departments operating near the national departmental medians. In contrast, hospitals with the lowest financial performance show a much greater number of departments operating with high cost per units of service and a few departments that operate extremely efficiently.”
The underperforming hospitals often spend most effort managing the large clinical and nursing areas thought to be “easiest” to benchmark, but perform poorly across most other departments. The hospital’s organizational structure also plays a role in financial performance.
“The more complicated your departmental structure and the more individual departments you maintain and administer, the more difficult it will be to manage a majority of departments to ‘median’ results,” the report authors noted.
Read the full report here.
