QUALITY METRICS

“Quality metrics” is another name for quality indicators or quality measures. They capture the measures the consumer uses when he or she decides whether your product or service has met their expectations. The concept is applicable to any industry, service, program, or product.

To illustrate, let’s look at a “service” example - acceptable patient waiting time for a clinic visit.  If, through your research, you have learned that your patients consider anything over 15 minutes as unacceptable then your performance standards will be measured against waiting times of 15 minutes or less.  Knowing what your customers want, you are able develop a plan to achieve a waiting time of less than 15 minutes and then monitor your clinic’s performance of that standard over time. If the standard is not met, you will then have an opportunity to develop plans for improvement.

Use of quality metrics helps you to:

• Capture performance in terms of how something is being done in relation to an established standard
• Allow and encourage comparisons
• Support business strategy
• Spot trends in performance
• Predict performance

To find out how we can help you use quality metrics to improve performance, call us.