CHAPTER 30
Metric-Driven Management: Harnessing Information in the Urgent Care Organization
Laurel Stoimenoff
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NEARLY ALL URGENT CARE center operators will tell you that they have systems or processes in place to implement key metrics in their businesses, yet metrics are meaningless without an ongoing and disciplined approach to amass, monitor, disseminate, and take action on the information. Microsoft’s Bill Gates summed it up perfectly when he said, “The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”1 In other words, your work doesn’t stop when your office manager hands you the data she’s collected on a colorful spreadsheet. You won’t excel in a sustained fashion until you have established processes in place to respond to any unfavorable variances or opportunities for improvement.
A well-designed management-control process is the engine that drives change and performance. Metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), are essential components of an organization’s approach to its overall strategy for operational excellence and market success. The word control is often applied negatively. For example, few employees seek “control freaks” as bosses. But control is actually a disciplined and deliberate intervention that supports the organization’s quest to achieve or exceed its business objectives.
Management control accompanied by the ongoing monitoring of KPIs should be dynamic, responsive, and inclusive. John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends, says that true power is not about “money in the hands of a few” but rather “information in the hands of many.” Distribution can be selective, and not all information needs to be or should be shared at all levels; on the other hand, good leaders should keep in mind the adage “What gets measured gets managed” when it comes to sharing those items that might enable an individual’s direct ability to influence an outcome.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton, authors of the best seller The Balanced Scorecard (1996)—as well as of The Strategy-Focused Organization (2000) and Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies (2006)—address how an organization can implement scorecards to define what is important to the organization and then use “balanced scorecards” to achieve and refine its strategy. Scorecards are divided into four quadrants: finance, internal business processes, the customer, and learning and growth.
To balance a scorecard means ensuring that all four categories are addressed, as follows: The financialcustomerinternal business processeslearning and growth