Performance Evaluation is something that has now become integral in every field and medical industry stands no exception and when huge amounts of capital, manpower and human lives are at stake this process of evaluation becomes a necessity.
Several measures for this purpose are available. Some of them include Performance Prism, Cambridge Performance Measurement process, TPM Process, Total Measurement development method and last but not the least, KPI (Key Performance Indicators). It is also called Key Success Indicator. It talks of employing various financial and non-financial metrics to know whether the organization is moving towards attaining the organizational objectives. Different measures exist for different industries and medical industry has its own set of such parameters.
Criteria for Medical Industry. Attaining of objectives is becoming all the more important with each passing day as the trend is more towards making use of Intellectual Capital to advance the cause of patients. Innovation is the buzzword these days. Companies are diverging more and more of their sales turnover towards the R&D to outperform their competitors. Also developing new drugs and making people live a safer and healthy life with a longer life span is a service towards society so it helps in earning a good reputation among masses. These objectives may pertain to developing cutting-edge technology to target the very basic fundamental molecules, better distribution etc. It also include better service delivery, coordination between different teams in hospitals including emergency services etc.
Key Challenges. Developing specific KPI for the medical industry in general is rather challenging tasks. It can range from Patient Satisfaction to Infection Control to specific domain areas where the difficulty in finding specific parameters is more complex. For that we can take R&D which is a very risky area because the uncertainty that whether the outcome is as per the expectations or not is something that is under veil till the process ends. One of the most important criteria or performance evaluation in medical industry is the expenditure on various aspects from service deliver to Research and Development. For some companies even Share Price Volatility can be used as a KPI. It is affected by the Drug Portfolio of the company. The more diversified is the portfolio, the more is the volatility. The others can be the percentage of revenues coming from new researches, no. of patents, price control and the diversification of drug portfolio.
Medical Industry encompasses a wide range of functions which thereby give rise to a similarly large range of KPIs. From Standardized Mortality ratio to staff commitment, from financial indicators to wait times, each KPI needs to be carefully calibrated as per needs of the organization. Also it would be fair to introduce customization depending upon the domain of the company. That apart thought should also be given to incorporate majority of the critical aspects many of them being intangibles like Patient goodwill and Physician commitment level.