Implementing Business Performance Metrics

Business Performance Metrics   I have reached out to Choice members to find out what is important to you and you have responded!  Sixty-nine percent of you say the most important thing Choice can do is to help you understand business performance metrics.  At the end of October, I did a short piece on Key Performance Indicators and feedback for that was tremendous!  Thank you for your thoughts.  This is the first of a series of articles that will give you practical guidance into becoming a data driven, quality focused company.  These articles will introduce you to metrics and performance scorecards and tools you can use in your practice.  I trust you will find this series informative, valuable and helpful as you manage your O&P practice. As we strive to understand and implement business performance metrics in our practices, a fundamental first step is to create a culture of excellence.  In “Good to Great,” author Jim Collins examines what differentiates “Good” companies (those with decent growth, customer service and market presence) from “Great” companies (the market leaders).  It boils down to “People.”  Good to great teams were mostly composed of people who had a good sense of balance with the rest of their lives – family, church, and so on. Of course, they had a deep commitment to their companies, but not one that blinded them to the other important things in their lives. The deep commitment comes from internalizing the mission, vision and values of the company.  When the company values and goals are also the values and goals of the people that work there, there is clarity of purpose and a strong desire to achieve the common objective.  These companies also employ some sort of “Performance Scorecard” which is a graphical representation of the progress over time toward some specified goal or goals. I will spend the next several weeks working through the concepts with you and will try to give concrete examples that you can use in your practice.  There are many models and samples for scorecards from which to choose, but for simplicity and consistency, we will use the OPIE Dashboards as our “Scorecards” in these articles. We will also use some OPIE Reports for those elements that do not have graphical representation on the Choice Dashboards. “Performance Scorecards” Performance scorecards are tools we use to track significant and sustainable improvements across all functions of our businesses. They are populated from metrics called key performance indicators (KPIs) which measure performance on factors considered to be critical to organizational success. Goals are established for each KPI with performance improvement achieved by closing the gaps between goals and actual performance. In the series we will focus on the Six Pillars of Practice Success: “Strategy & Sustainability,” “Operational/Administrative,” “Clinical,” “Materials Fabrication,” “Financial” and “Patient Satisfaction.”  Each article will look at one of those topics and examine KPIs that you can use to measure your practice.  So between now and next week, take a few minutes to read this article published by the Harvard Business Review “Creating and Sustaining a Winning Culture.” the building block upon which everything we will do is based on your culture and your staff’s understanding of that culture.   The goal of this series is to give you the tools and information you need to start implementing a data driven O&P business model on January 1, 2017. Let’s get started and be ready to ask questions!