Dear Colleagues:
As recently as 1999, Brigham and Women’s Hospital had 11 different definitions for patient length of stay, and we recorded LOS in six different places in varying time intervals. Essentially, our performance on length of stay—and countless other metrics—depended on whom you asked.
I am proud to say this is no longer the case. Thanks to the work of the Center for Clinical Excellence’s Decision Support Systems team and SAS Inc., we all have access to the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), which collects patient-level data from more than 80 sources and gives us a hospital-wide perspective on our performance relative to service, quality of care, people and financial strength.
In addition to the 30,000-foot institutional view, the BSC includes physician-level performance data for Surgery, Gynecology, Obstetrics, Orthopedics and Neurosurgery. The data is there, it’s correct and meaningful, and it’s invaluable in analyzing individual performance. I urge physicians to review their own performance data, compare it to your peers and use it as the basis for improvement. In instances where you may be underperforming, review that data with your medical director and look to your peers for improvement.
More BSC data is coming to Emergency Medicine, and the CCE is working to add ambulatory metrics to bring more valuable data to the departments of Medicine, Neurology, Dermatology and Psychology. Radiology and Pathology, too, are looking to collaborate with the CCE on scorecards.
That kind of collaboration has been integral to the success of the Balanced Scorecard. The CCE’s director, BWH Vice President Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, the CCE’s Decision Support Services manager, Troy Tomilonus, and their team of analysts and programmers continue to assist individual physicians, divisions and departments in manipulating the Balanced Scorecard to make it relevant. The entire team is more than capable and committed to performance improvement throughout the hospital.