CONFERENCE | Monday, March 25
The Team Scorecard Project
Many hospitals collect and report several aspects of their performance in the form of a Balanced Scorecard, a tool adopted from the consumer industry. These Balanced Scorecards provide high-level snapshots of hospital performance, which include hospital-acquired infections, surgery cancellations, length of stay in the emergency department, employee sick hours, various revenue-based measures, and more. While the Balanced Scorecard is a valuable tool for administrative staff, it is not granular enough to measure performance at the operational level, and limits the opportunity for quality improvement to be driven by those who directly provide and impact patient care on a daily basis.
The goal of this project is to create a team-level scorecard, and provide the interdisciplinary frontline care teams of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, residents, and others with relevant and meaningful information they need to be aware of to improve the care of their patients. Each department will have its own unique scorecard, with measures that reflect care quality, efficiency, the patient experience, and teamwork. The user-centered design process is playing a huge part in the development of the scorecard, as the working environment of clinicians is so complex and chaotic; they are always on their feet, running from patient to patient, and meeting to meeting. They are rarely at a desk, and their time to reflect, analyze or discuss anything other than the daily care of their patients is very limited. This project is currently being piloted across two departments at Toronto General Hospital, a large teaching hospital within the University Health Network.
