Hospital Balanced Scorecard: Example Template with KPIs

An example of a Hospital Balanced Scorecard template with KPIs, where management seeks to improve clinical practice, prevention and health services management.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) plays an important role in the management of healthcare organizations 1 as it aligns the mission, objectives and performance metrics.

Balanced Scorecard for a Hospital - review of the strategy map template in BSC Designer Online

In this article, we will discuss:

Balanced Scorecard Design

Examples of the Balanced Scorecard strategy map for Hospital

An example of the strategy map for a hospital. Source: View Hospital Scorecard online in BSC Designer Hospital Scorecard.

Similar to other types of organization, the strategy of a hospital can be presented by four perspectives:

  • The Learning and Growth perspective, where the required skills and infrastructure are defined.
  • The Internal Processes perspective, where management focuses on the internal processes that are critical to meet the needs of the clients.
  • The perspective of the Clients that, in this case, would cover patients and doctors.
  • The Financial perspective, where the economic objectives of the organization are defined.

Mission Statement

First of all, it is a good idea to have a mission that guides the organization. For this example, we have chosen “Offer a quality service for health welfare.”  

Typical Challenges

For this example, we identified the following typical challenges of a hospital.

Finance perspective

  • Driving revenue and profit growth within the competition

Clients perspective

  • Patient diagnostics safety
  • Increase medication safety
  • Improve availability of services

Internal Hospital Processes

Learning and Growth

  • Increase morale
  • Improve expertise
  • Introducing learning programs

KPIs for a Hospital

How can we quantify and measure those goals? In the example above, we shared some examples. Here are additional KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that hospital management use.

  1. Hospital bed occupancy rate
  2. Staff turnover
  3. Average length of stay
  4. Time to service
  5. Hospital incidents
  6. Patient satisfaction
  7. Number of mistake events
  8. Patient confidentiality
  9. Training per unit

Hospital scorecard examples of KPIs

The hierarchy of the goals and performance indicators that measure the performance of a hospital strategy. Source: View Hospital Scorecard online in BSC Designer Hospital Scorecard.

The list of metrics goes on and should be adapted to the challenges of the hospital. You can find the references to more specific metrics below:

  • Emergency service metrics 2
  • Perioperative service metrics and surgical care costs metrics 3
  • Pharmacy Key Performance Indicators 4

Case Study: Balanced Scorecard Helps Hospital Improve Service and Tighten Funding Allocation

Scorecard in Bridgeport HospitalBridgeport Hospital, a private, not-for-profit hospital in Connecticut, needed to improve its financial management.  The hospital had been operating at a loss despite being adequately funded, and also needed to find a way to make excellence in customer care and employee retention relevant to financial goals. The Balanced Scorecard approach helped Bridgeport to improve fiscal responsibility while improving in key service delivery areas.

Introduction

Bridgeport Hospital, located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is part of the Yale New Haven Health System. This private, not-for-profit acute care hospital has:

  • 425 licensed beds,
  • more than 2,600 employees and
  • 550 active attending physicians representing more than 60 subspecialties.

Bridgeport Hospital provides nearly:

  • 250,000 patient care visits annually, including 20,000 admissions;
  • nearly 230,000 total outpatient visits to the hospital (including more than 72,000 emergency department visits and 35,000 clinic visits);
  • 7,200 same-day surgery visits, and
  • 38,000 outpatient rehabilitation visits.

The Challenge

Financial pressures, including federal funding changes and an overall shift towards outpatient care has resulted in widespread downsizing and closures among hospitals in the U.S.

Operating margins at U.S. hospitals were, on average, 20% lower in 2001 than they were four years earlier.

These challenges are forcing hospitals to attend more rigorously to the financial aspect of their business.  However, patient care is still at the core of what they do, and they must find ways of building patient care metrics into their management models.

Bridgeport Hospital, a member of the Yale New Haven Health System, needed to address the financial realities of a challenging funding and operational environment while maintaining an ongoing commitment to excellence in patient care.

Quality, patient satisfaction and staff retention were key areas that the hospital wanted to improve, and they needed to find a way to connect those pursuits to financial outcomes.

Additionally, Bridgeport knew that they had not been completely efficient in allocating funding towards their operations; despite being adequately funded, they were operating at a loss. They needed to find a way to use their capital more effectively and make it stretch further towards organizational excellence.

The Solution

The Balanced Scorecard gave Bridgeport a framework for connecting:

  • quality clinical outcomes,
  • expert clinical care providers,
  • satisfied patients,
  • doctors and staff,
  • volume and
  • market share growth to financial measures.

The hospital began by bringing together management groups to map a course to financial health.  The leadership team, along with the board of directors and medical and administrative staff crafted three scenarios for future success.  Clinical priorities that fit these scenarios were further refined with the help of external community physicians, and ultimately the three scenarios were merged to create a single vision for the future.

The vision was supported by four perspectives:

  • organizational health,
  • quality and process improvement,
  • volume and market share growth and
  • financial health.

As part of the quality initiative, Bridgeport tasked Employee of the Month Award winners to craft an accountability system that translated excellent customer service into a series of simple, measurable activities known as the Service Contract.

The contract was made up of seven daily commitments, such as,

  • “I will introduce myself to patients 100% of the time,”
  • “I will be sensitive and aware of cultural diversity,” and,
  • “I will keep patients and families informed.”

Adherence to the Service Contract was taken into consideration during employee evaluations, and accounted for 50% of the merit increase they could be given.

This gave employees a clear and performable set of behaviors that are directly linked to compensation.

The Balanced Scorecard was also instrumental in helping the hospital to collaboratively prioritize capital budget items.

  • In the first year, the leadership team used the Scorecard to set budget items,
  • but in year two, they were able to tabulate specific scores for budget items listed under each of the four perspectives.

Items with weaker scores were given lower funding priority.

This process has allowed clinicians and senior management to increase their understanding of the clinical and other dimensions of care.  It has also transformed a fairly political process into one that is team-oriented and goal-driven, bringing physicians, clinicians and lay managers together in an open collaboration towards common goals. What used to be determined behind closed doors by the finance department is on openly evaluated in a transparent and understandable process.

The Result

The Balanced Scorecard has given the organization a shared language, which is especially crucial for an organization made up of so many highly skilled, diverse and strong-willed professionals.

  • Clinicians are now able to think in terms of financial impacts, and
  • non-clinicians are able to better understand the clinical measures required for excellence in patient care.

Annual strategic planning takes far less time since the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard, because only the metrics change.  The plan remains essentially unchanged from year to year.

After one year of Balanced Scorecard implementation, Bridgeport had achieved significant improvements in several key areas.

  • They were able to lower the turnover rates among registered nurses and overall staff to exceed the human resources target they had set.
  • Bridgeport met their goals for providing a certain volume of care in all care areas, and exceeded their goal for cardiovascular surgery and diagnostic cardiac catheterization.
  • And perhaps most importantly, patient satisfaction and customer preference increased.

While achieving improved performance in a number of areas, the hospital also met its financial goals.   They were able to increase the price of their managed care services, stay below the allocated staffing budget and achieve supply chain savings of $750,000 in excess of their goal.

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Examples of the Balanced Scorecard with KPIs
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  1. Villalbi J, Guix J, Casas C, Borrell C, Duran J, Artazcoz L, et al. The Balanced Scorecard as a management instrument in a public health organization. Gac Sanit, 2007 Available at: http://www.scielosp.org/pdf/gs/v21n1/originales_breves2.pdf
  2. Emergency Departments Key Performance Indicators: A Unified Framework And Its Practice. Núñez, Neriz, Mateo, Ramis, Ramaprasad
  3. Key Performance Indicators across the Perioperative Process: Holistic Opportunities for Improvement via Business Process Management. Ryan, Doster, Daily, Lewis
  4. Development of Clinical Pharmacy Key Performance Indicators for Hospital Pharmacists Using a Modified Delphi Approach, 2015
Cite as: BSC Designer, "Hospital Balanced Scorecard: Example Template with KPIs," BSC Designer, August 6, 2019, https://bscdesigner.com/hospital-kpis.htm.