Liebe J D, Hübner U
Health Informatics Research Group, University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück, Department of Business Management and, Social Sciences, P.O. Box 1940, 49009 Osnabrück, Germany.
Methods Inf Med. 2013;52(4):360-9. doi: 10.3414/ME12-02-0016. Epub 2013 Jul 23.
Continuous improvements of IT-performance in healthcare organisations require actionable performance indicators, regularly conducted, independent measurements and meaningful and scalable reference groups. Existing IT-benchmarking initiatives have focussed on the development of reliable and valid indicators, but less on the questions about how to implement an environment for conducting easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarks.
This study aims at developing and trialling a procedure that meets the afore-mentioned requirements.
We chose a well established, regularly conducted (inter-) national IT-survey of healthcare organisations (IT-Report Healthcare) as the environment and offered the participants of the 2011 survey (CIOs of hospitals) to enter a benchmark. The 61 structural and functional performance indicators covered among others the implementation status and integration of IT-systems and functions, global user satisfaction and the resources of the IT-department. Healthcare organisations were grouped by size and ownership. The benchmark results were made available electronically and feedback on the use of these results was requested after several months.
Fifty-ninehospitals participated in the benchmarking. Reference groups consisted of up to 141 members depending on the number of beds (size) and the ownership (public vs. private). A total of 122 charts showing single indicator frequency views were sent to each participant. The evaluation showed that 94.1% of the CIOs who participated in the evaluation considered this benchmarking beneficial and reported that they would enter again. Based on the feedback of the participants we developed two additional views that provide a more consolidated picture.
The results demonstrate that establishing an independent, easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarking procedure is possible and was deemed desirable. Based on these encouraging results a new benchmarking round which includes process indicators is currently conducted.
医疗保健机构中信息技术性能的持续提升需要可操作的性能指标、定期进行的独立测量以及有意义且可扩展的参考组。现有的信息技术基准测试计划主要关注可靠且有效的指标的开发，而较少关注如何营造一个便于进行可重复且可扩展的信息技术基准测试的环境。
本研究旨在开发并试验一种满足上述要求的程序。
我们选择了一项成熟的、定期开展的针对医疗保健机构的（跨）国信息技术调查（《医疗保健信息技术报告》）作为环境，并邀请2011年调查的参与者（医院的首席信息官）参与基准测试。涵盖的61项结构和功能性能指标包括信息技术系统和功能的实施状况与整合情况、总体用户满意度以及信息技术部门的资源等。医疗保健机构按规模和所有权进行分组。基准测试结果以电子方式提供，并在几个月后要求提供有关这些结果使用情况的反馈。
59家医院参与了基准测试。参考组根据床位数量（规模）和所有权（公立与私立）最多由141名成员组成。总共向每位参与者发送了122张显示单个指标频率视图的图表。评估显示，参与评估的首席信息官中有94.1%认为此次基准测试有益，并表示他们会再次参与。根据参与者的反馈，我们又开发了另外两种视图，能提供更综合的情况。
结果表明，建立一个独立的、易于重复且可扩展的信息技术基准测试程序是可行的，而且被认为是可取的。基于这些令人鼓舞的结果，目前正在开展一轮新的包括过程指标的基准测试。
