Another challenge for health organizations is a lack of a suitable and well-organized IT infrastructure founded on performance measurement principles. A lack of a proper IT infrastructure makes it challenging for hospital managers to assess, track, and manage performance effectively since the performance dashboard displays crucial information about attaining strategic objectives (Randell et al., 2020). Consequently, hospital managers encounter challenges in recognizing problem areas requiring corrective interventions, evaluating the basis of poor performance, predicting trends, and establishing benchmarks.
The challenge in data sources can result in poor data quality due to huge amounts of irrelevant data and unreliability. As a result, a healthcare organization may not use the dashboards to the maximum level and produce unreliable results. Besides, the challenge on IT infrastructure can result in an organization designing inefficient dashboards, thus not meeting prescribed benchmarks (Randell et al., 2020). I assume that a healthcare organization must invest in healthcare technology to meet its prescribed benchmarks. The lack of a strong IT foundation is likely to result in inconsistent, time-consuming, incomparable, and static performance reports that do not transparently replicate the real picture of an organization’s performance.
Benchmarking involves comparing and measuring an organization’s services versus other national organizations. An example of a benchmark underperformance in our organization with the potential for significantly improving overall quality and performance is improving patient safety. Patient safety affects the greatest number of patients since reduced safety results in increased hospital stays, complications, comorbidities, readmission rates, and increased healthcare costs (Weggelaar-Jansen et al., 2018). Additionally, reduced safety affects the greatest number of staff due to a high workload which causes burnout and poor health outcomes.
If a healthcare organization focused on improving patient safety, it would significantly reduce staff workload, and reduce patient and operational costs. Tracking this benchmark can help an organization identify which part of the care process the safety incidents occur and adjust its standards appropriately (Weggelaar-Jansen et al., 2018). Furthermore, improving patient safety can help reduce the incidents that compromise patient safety, such as medical errors, patient falls, and hospital-acquired infections. Improving patient safety can help meet metrics such as reduced hospital stays, readmission rates, and ultimately reduced hospital costs (Weggelaar-Jansen et al., 2018). Besides, it can improve overall health outcomes and patient satisfaction, thus increasing profits for the organization
My recommended action to improve patient safety in the organization will be directed to the hospital’s management to improve working conditions by increasing nurse-to-patient ratios. Nursing ratios can be increased by hiring more nurses and motivating staff to reduce high turnover that further worsens the understaffing situation (Bridges et al., 2019). Increasing nursing ratios will significantly reduce burnout and eventually lower turnover rates, which are the major cause of understaffing. When staffing nurses in various units, the nursing manager should consider factors, such as patient acuity, admission numbers, staff skill-mix and expertise, discharges, transfers, physical layout of the unit, and available technology (Bridges et al., 2019). Considering these factors will ensure that a unit is staffed based on the patient care workload and fair staffing.
The management should increase nursing staffing because nurses play a vital role in promoting patient safety while providing direct patient care. Nurses assess patients for deterioration in clinical status, track errors and near misses, and perform numerous tasks to make sure that a patient is provided high-quality care (Bridges et al., 2019). Besides, they understand care processes and shortcomings in systems that may compromise patient safety and communicate changes in patients’ health status. Missed nursing care incidents are strongly connected with a high patient workload and cause undesirable consequences for patients and nurses (Bridges et al., 2019). Consequently, increasing nursing ratios can ensure that a nurse is not overwhelmed and lower incidences of medication e
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