Assess your personal performance with key performance measures

Healthcare Financial Management, Annual, 2004 by Roland S. Funsten

"What have you done for me lately?" How often does someone ask us that question-whether in jest or sincerity, or perhaps even with a note of sarcasm? You could say that the question is implicit in our daily working relationships with individuals at every level of our organizations. And as hospitals develop revenue-cycle processes that call for increased inter-reliance of people across the organization, your response assumes increasing significance.

So how do you respond? In this fast-paced world of voice-mail, e-mail, and the Internet, we rarely take the time to reflect on what we have accomplished professionally. But as revenue-cycle leaders, we owe it not just to our organizations, but also to ourselves to be able to point to our successes. You probably spend a lot of time tracking and measuring your organization's revenue-cycle performance. Why shouldn't you do the same with your own performance?

When assessing your organization's revenue-cycle performance, you likely have a set of measures that you monitor on an ongoing basis. At the very least, this set should include the following key performance measures (KPMs):

* Total accounts receivable (A/R)

* Net A/R

* Aged A/R by aging category

* Net and gross days in A/R

* Discharged, not final billed

* Cash collection

* Net revenue recovery rate

* Uncompensated care

These KPMs should be reviewed individually and collectively, and findings should be reported at least monthly. Reviewing this information regularly will enable you and your team of professionals to identify problematic areas, diagnose the issues, identify root causes, and develop work plans for eliminating the root causes and improving performance.

Monitoring trends with these KPMs will tell a valuable story not just about your organization's revenue-cycle performance, but also about your own performance as a healthcare financial executive. When evaluating your personal performance, you should use the same measures, with the same reports, that are used by your CEO, board of directors, and staff managers when they are evaluating overall revenue-cycle performance.

Most important for self-evaluation, you should ask yourself what actions and steps you have taken personally to improve KPM trends. And if a problem area becomes evident, you should ask yourself what you could do differently to solve the problem.

Evaluating KPMs from a personal perspective is an important step to providing professional value to your organization. The desire to recognize and communicate your personal accomplishments should not be regarded as a reflection of pride. Understanding the facts of any given situation and how they affect performance is critical to an organization's success, whether those facts apply to the whole organization, to a single department, or to one individual.

Roland S. Funsten, MBA, M HA, is assistant vice president, finance, St. Vincent Health, Indianapolis, and a member of H FMA's Indiana Pressler Memorial Chapter.

Send your questions or comments to Roland S. Funsten at RSFunste@stvincent.org.