Performance management is, ideally, an ongoing quality-assurance-based process. The process provides an organization, its employees, regulatory agencies, accreditors, and other stakeholders with a structured means to support and accomplish mutually identified strategic goals and objectives.
Assume the role of a newly-hired risk management officer for a hypothetical new allied health organization in your chosen career field. You and your team will need to develop the organization’s policies.
The first item you will create will be a performance management plan. The HIM Briefings (2019) article, which includes Lean, Six Sigma, or PDSA, is located in the topic Resources. Using the resources in HIM Briefings or another qualified framework, craft a proposal (1,250-1,500 words) for a performance management plan for the new organization that includes the following:
- Organizational Goals: Provide a statement of the organization’s goals regarding workplace safety, risk management, or quality improvement; select one area, and develop five goals for that specific area.
- Outline of Organizational Objectives: Outline and provide a brief evaluation of specific objectives that support the organizational goals you previously identified, to include the use of an interdisciplinary approach to patient care.
- Rationale: Evaluate the use of the interdisciplinary approach to patient care in the performance management plan. What provisions were planned in order to include this approach effectively?
- Quality and Process Outcomes: Describe the importance of quality and process outcomes within one’s scope of practice.
- Summary of Relevant Performance Measures: Summarize the steps and measures the new organization will adopt to measure performance. Consider (a) how well measures will align with the stated goals, (b) how these measures demonstrate the importance of quality and the relationship to positive health outcomes, (c) how the measures are able to be controlled by the organization (i.e., how the organization can affect change in this area), and (d) how the measures meet criteria related to reliability and validity, and are standardized.
- Performance Baseline: Determine a performance baseline for the measures selected. This will enable the organization to conduct comparisons of desired goals versus actual results over time.
- Performance Evaluation: Select one of three commonly accepted methods to measure provider quality. Summarize the features and why it applies best to the organization. Refer to the assigned reading, “The Measurement of Health Care Performance: A Primer from the Council of Medical Specialty Societies.”
- Definition of Success: Define what success means to the organization. Now that you have chosen measures to assess organizational performance, identify what success means to the organization; otherwise, you are chasing a moving target. Be explicit in the level of performance you see as acceptable. This will change as an organization grows, but you need to start somewhere in order to get anywhere.
