Porter suggests that specialization of hospitals improves performance it results in a better process organization, improved patient satisfaction, increased cost-effectiveness and better outcomes. The number of specialty hospitals is increasing. These are standalone, single-specialty facilities. describe specialty hospitals as hospitals “that treat patients with specific medical conditions or those in need of specific medical or surgical procedures” (pp.531). Accordingly, we wanted to obtain an overview on benchmarking of specialty hospitals and specialty care pathways. , these steps included amongst others the construction of a framework, the development of relevant and comparable indicators selected by the stakeholders and the measuring and analysing of the set of indicators. The benchmarking study was executed according to the 13 steps developed by van Lent et al. This international benchmark project included 8 pilot sites from three geographical regions in Europe (North-West ( N = 2), South ( N = 3), Central-East ( N = 3).
The BENCHCAN project aims at benchmarking comprehensive cancer care and yield good practice examples at European Cancer Centers in order to contribute to improvement of multidisciplinary patient treatment. īefore embarking on an international project to develop and pilot a benchmarking tool for quality assessment of comprehensive cancer care (the BENCH-CAN project ) there was a need to establish the state of the art in this field, amongst others to avoid duplication of work. Identifying meaningful measures that are able to capture the quality of care in its different dimensions remains a challenging aspiration. , benchmarking as a tool to improve quality in hospitals is not well described and possibly not well developed. īenchmarking may improve hospital processes, though according to Van Lent et al. It requires measuring and evaluating data to establish a target performance level or benchmark to evaluate current performance and comparing these benchmarks or performance metrics with similar data compiled by other organizations, including best- practice facilities. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of benchmarking to improve quality in specialty hospitals, robust and structured designs are needed including a follow up to check whether the benchmark study has led to improvements.Ī systematic, data- driven process of continuous improvement that involves internally and/ or externally comparing performance to identify, achieve, and sustain best practice. However, the majority of the articles lacked a structured design, and did not report on benchmark outcomes. Some studies showed promising improvement effects. Conclusionsīenchmarking seems to be more developed in eye hospitals, emergency departments and oncology specialty hospitals.
Most of the studies that described a benchmark model described the use of benchmarking partners from the same industry category, sometimes from all over the world. There was a large degree of variability:(1) study designs were mostly descriptive and retrospective (2) not all studies generated and showed data in sufficient detail and (3) there was variety in whether a benchmarking model was just described or if quality improvement as a consequence of the benchmark was reported upon. Articles were categorized into: pathway benchmarking, institutional benchmarking, articles on benchmark methodology or -evaluation and benchmarking using a patient registry. Of 1,817 articles identified in total, 24 were included in the study. Eligible articles described a project stating benchmarking as its objective and involving a specialty hospital or specific patient category or those dealing with the methodology or evaluation of benchmarking. We searched PubMed and EMBASE for articles published in English in the last 10 years. The aim of this study was to provide an overview of publications on benchmarking in specialty hospitals and a description of study characteristics. Although benchmarking may improve hospital processes, research on this subject is limited.
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