Performance Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘healthcare’

Metrics reflecting the health insurance coverage in the U.S.A.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

The Gallup Daily tracking analysis, Health Insurance Coverage Varies Widely by Age and Income, underlines the wide degree of variability in 2009 in health insurance coverage across U.S. population segments, based on age and income. Health insurance coverage is one of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used to track the health of the national healthcare system (smartkpis.com, 2010).

Source: Newport, 2010

As indicated by the graphic above, the health insurance coverage is generally lowest in Americans’ mid-twenties and strongly related to income, ranging from a low of 44% among 35-year-olds making less than $24,000 a year to 100% among seniors in their 70s making more than $24,000 a year (Newport, F 2010).

An average of 16.2% of American adults lacked health insurance coverage in 2009, increasing up from 14.8% in 2008. The analysis indicates that lack of health insurance coverage is due to two main reasons:

voluntary decision to do without
economic circumstances, including lack of access to employer-paid insurance.

Source: Mendes, 2010

An average of 39.9% hispanics lack healthcare coverage, this representing more than double the current national average. This level of the indicator makes hispanics the most likely demographic segment of the adult population to be uninsured. From 2008 to 2009, the percentage of uninsured low-income Americans, Hispanics, and blacks increased by 2.9 percentage points (Mendes, E 2010).

The results of the analysis are based on telephone interviews with more than 353,849 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2009.

Resources:

Newport, F 2010, Health Insurance Coverage Varies Widely by Age and Income, available at: http://www.gallup.comhttp://www.gallup.com/poll/126143/health-insurance-coverage-varies-widely-age-income.aspx/poll/126143/health-insurance-coverage-varies-widely-age-income.aspx (accessed 19 July 2010)

Mendes, E 2010, More Americans Went Uninsured in 2009 Than in 2008, available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/124973/Americans-Went-Uninsured-2009-2008.aspx (accessed 19 July 2010)

smartkpis.com 2010, % Health Insurance Coverage, available at: http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi-key-performance-indicator/Health-insurance-coverage-2668.html (accessed 20 July 2010)

Tags: Gallup, Gallup Daily, Health Insurance Coverage, healthcare, healthcare metrics, US health insurance
Posted in KPI, Library of KPI examples, Performance Measurement, smartKPIs.com | No Comments »

The Quest for Quality and Improved Performance – an initiative of The Health Foundation

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

The Health Foundation, the independent charity working to achieve high quality healthcare for people in the UK, has celebrated this year the conclusion of one of their main research programs: Quest for Quality and Improved Performance (QQUIP).

The research has been conducted during 2005-2010, to provide independent results about the quality and performance of the healthcare provision. Its purpose is to provide answers to three questions regarding healthcare, considered fundamental (The Health Foundation 2010):

What is the current state of healthcare and performance?
What works to improve quality and performance?
Is value for money obtained from what is spent in the National Healthcare System (NHS)?

The program has had three different streams of research, as shown below:

Source: The Health Foundation, 2010

The Quality Enhancing Interventions were identified as six main areas where efforts should be put so as to improve quality and performance:

Patient focused interventions
Regulatory interventions
Incentives
Data-driven and IT based interventions (which was broken into Performance Reporting & Accountability and Information & Knowledge Management)
Organizational interventions
Healthcare delivery models.

Source: The Health Foundation, 2010

During the time interval of the research, several outputs in the shape of reports were produced, studying issues such as:

Patient and public experience in the NHS
Value from money in the English NHS
Regulation and quality improvement
Costs and benefits of health information technologies
Safe and risk management in hospitals.

For more about the QQUIP initiative, visit The Health Foundation’s webpage, or directly download the research reports.

References:

The Health Foundation 2010, Quest for Quality and Improved Performance, available at: http://www.health.org.uk/current_work/research_development/qquip.html (accessed 3 July 2010).

The Health Foundation 2010, Quest for Quality and Improved Performance Brochure, available at: http://www.health.org.uk/document.rm?id=1178 (accessed 3 July 2010).

Tags: healthcare, National Healthcare System (NHS), QQUIP, Quest for Quality and Improved Performance, The Health Foundation
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Performance Management case study: Plan – Do – Check – Act (PDCA) in a non-profit organization

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

smartKPIs.com Performance Architect update 22/2010

Improving children’s quality of life in developing countries is today a priority of thousands of non-for-profit organizations. It is a difficult journey, influenced by many macro and microeconomic, political, social, cultural and religious factors. Many such efforts are structured in programs and projects. Monitoring not only their implementation, but also their impact is a requirement not only for tracking if they make a difference, but also for attracting new funding and other resources for future programs. Overall, many non-profit programs employ robust performance management systems to support the achievement of their purpose. Designing and using such systems is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Organisation

A non-profit organization.

Setting

The organization operates in both urban and rural regions, implementing programs and projects targeting specific health and early childhood development issues.

Mandate

Improve the health and education of children in at risk communities in developing countries.

Instruments

A performance management system is in place, linking objectives, performance indicators and initiatives.

Performance indicators

To monitor the achievement of this objective a set of performance measures can be established, targeting some of the specific issues to be addressed. For example:

% Incidents of anemia

# Average scores on language and communication skills for toddlers

# Average scores for vocabulary tests

Scenario

The organization is following the standard Deming cycle applied in a performance management context: Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Each year it formulates a plan of activities, specifying objectives, performance indicators and projects to be implemented. It monitors results every six months, when following an analysis of these results, review meetings take place. They generally result in a recalibration of initiatives and sometimes new ones are established. Several programs and projects are running at any time, aimed at raising awareness in the community of health and educational issues. Additional projects targeted specific issues such as improving the economic situation of the families in the community, better equipping the kindergarten / primary school and training the educators.

Some success was reflected by the reduction of the incidents of anemia and improvement in the scores.

However, after a while, the performance reports started to reflect a stabilization of results and no further improvements were achieved.

Questions

What changes to the existing portfolio of projects and programs should the organization make to improve results?
How should the organization alter the Performance Management System in use to facilitate better results?
What approach to stakeholder management should the organization take to facilitate sustainable changes in the community?

Stay smart! Enjoy smartKPIs.com!

Aurel Brudan

Performance Architect,
www.smartKPIs.com

Discuss the case in the smartKPIs.com Forum

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Tags: Education, healthcare, Non-Profit
Posted in Case Study, Government, KPI, Performance Architect update, Performance Management, Performance Measurement, smartKPIs.com | No Comments »