The Benefits and Obstacles of Benchmarking the Healthcare System in the United States

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Date
The Benefits and Obstacles of Benchmarking the Healthcare System in the United States
Any successful organization has a system through which it measures its performance and implements measures to continuously improve its quality. The United States healthcare quality system is one of the programs that should be monitored for the delivery of quality services. The exercise should be done to identify the loopholes that may impede service delivery and to take advantage of the available opportunities. There are several ways to track a program’s success metrics based on one’s needs and the time frame that the individual is seeking to monitor. Notable techniques include the use of benchmarking, scorecards, dashboard, value chain, and implementation. The choice of the tool to use depends on what one is look for. More importantly, the choice depends on the type of metrics being tracked and the goals associated with tracking this information.
US Healthcare Quality Improvement
The roots of quality improvement in the United States healthcare sector can be traced back to the 19th century prominent figures, such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who is remembered for his role in championing the importance of hand washing in medical care. Another notable figure is Florence Nightingale, an English nurse who established a link between high death rates and poor living conditions among soldiers treated at army hospitals (Marjoua & Kevin. There is also Ernest Codmans, a surgeon, who instigated the creation of hospital standards and emphasized on strategies to evaluate healthcare outcomes. The efforts of these prominent people have steered the country’s quality system to great levels. The modern quality movement has since evolved to include a variety of stakeholders, a range of approaches, and a unique set of goals all designed to enhance the patient outcome.
There have been several notable improvements in healthcare quality over the last half a century. A significant number of these efforts were contributed by the academic health quality improvement. The entire process began with a series of articles that began highlighting the deficiencies in healthcare delivery. Consequently, a series of quality monitoring models came up to help monitor service delivery and help improve the quality of organizations. These tools assessed the service delivery in terms of the objectives, measures, initiatives, and action items. Others concentrated on assessing the overall efficiency of an organization or the services rendered. Assessing the current performance of the country’s healthcare sector using the different tools of quality monitoring can help identify gaps that still exist and advance approaches that can help seal those gaps.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking comes across as a process of comparing an organization’s performance to the performance of another similar entity. This technique serves as a short cut to the performance assessment as it does not focus on unveiling new ways of doing things or reinventing practices that are already in use by other entities. Its main objective is to uncover best practices and adopt them. Best practices refers to the approaches that have...