Sometime during the late eighties , I was admitted in an Army Hospital in Central India for treatment of multiple fracture suffered during a vehicle accident. I happened to over hear a conversation between the Registrar of the hospital and the Superintendent who was giving the daily report to the Registrar. When the Superintendent told the Registrar that the bed occupancy was only 60 percent due to large number of discharges of patients during the last seven days, the Registrar was visibly annoyed. His response was on the following lines-
“My dear S uperintendent,you will get this hospital closed very soon. Don’t you know that The Army Standing Committee is visiting next week to review our establishment and they will reduce the staff drastically in the new authorisation if they notice the low bed occupancy. From today onwards, no patient will be discharged without my personal clearance.OK.”
Now, what should be a good metric for a hospital’s performance ? The bed occupancy or quality of treatment? or recovery rate of seriously ill patients?. When you look at the commercial objective , bed occupancy generates more revenue like a hotel . But is that what hospitals are meant for? . A super market may look at the footfalls per day to measure the popularity and acceptance in a locality but individual shops will have to consider sales value per visitor to arrive at its profitability. Similarly, a service provider of cell phones can boast of a large market share but if the revenue per call is lower than a competitor ,the market share alone will not keep them there long.
In short,metrics should facilitate business goals both in the short term and over a longer time horizon and more important, it should also align with the laid down mission of an enterprise . All other measurements are waste of time.