Developing and Trialling an Independent, Scalable and Repeatable IT-benchmarking Procedure for Healthcare Organisations

SummaryBackground: Continuous improvements of IT-performance in healthcare organisations require actionable performance indicators, regularly conducted, independent measurements and meaningful and scalable reference groups. Existing IT-benchmarking initiatives have focussed on the development of reliable and valid indicators, but less on the questions about how to implement an environment for conducting easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarks.Objectives: This study aims at developing and trialling a procedure that meets the afore-mentioned requirements.Methods: We chose a well established, regularly conducted (inter-) national IT-survey of healthcare organisations (IT-Report Health-care) as the environment and offered the participants of the 2011 survey (CIOs of hospitals) to enter a benchmark. The 61 structural and functional performance indicators cov -ered among others the implementation status and integration of IT-systems and functions, global user satisfaction and the resources of the IT-department. Healthcare organisations were grouped by size and ownership. The benchmark results were made available electronically and feedback on the use of these results was requested after several months.Results: Fifty-nine hospitals participated in the benchmarking. Reference groups consisted of up to 141 members depending on the number of beds (size) and the ownership (public vs. private). A total of 122 charts showing single indicator frequency views were sent to each participant. The evaluation showed that 94.1% of the CIOs who participated in the evaluation considered this benchmarking beneficial and reported that they would enter again. Based on the feedback of the participants we developed two additional views that provide a more consolidated picture.Conclusion: The results demonstrate that establishing an independent, easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarking procedure is possible and was deemed desirable. Based on these encouraging results a new benchmarking round which includes process indicators is currently conducted.

A Survey on the Barriers of Benchmarking Implementation in Malaysia Oil Palm Industry

Malaysia is the largest producer and exporter of palm oil. Nevertheless, Malaysia may soon lose its position if there are lacks of initiatives to sustain it. Benchmarking can be used to stimulate process improvement by determining best practices across oil palm organizations through understanding critical success factors which enabled higher performance in leading organizations. The main objective of this paper is to identify benchmarking barriers that hinder or disrupt the benchmarking implementation in oil palm industry. To achieve these objectives, 700 sets of questionnaire were distributed among oil palm planters and millers in Malaysia. The survey results had indicated that the three main obstacles faced in implementing benchmarking in oil palm industry are: lack of understanding of benchmarking knowledge, lack of clarity with regard to specific areas to be benchmarked and management culture. In the authors’ opinion this survey findings would be useful and considerable interest to all level of benchmarking practitioners in the oil palm industry.