Benchmarking Service Efficiency

With more than 110 maternity hospitals participating in our Benchmarking Program, we are able to provide benchmarks with women’s health services of similar size and capability to your own.  Whether you are leading a tertiary women’s hospital, or the maternity ward or special care nursery of a rural hospital, you will find meaningful peer comparators in our reports.   

Our Reports draw upon de-identified data about the care provided to every woman and newborn at your service.  They help to identify comparative results for women attending your service compared with peer services seeing similar women & newborns in terms of: 

• comparative levels of demand for care across the different diagnosis groups,  
• duration of stay by diagnosis and complexity,  
• the profile of long stay patients 
• urgent readmissions 
• planned versus emergency workloads 
• average costs for women’s care by diagnosis, bed days and/or complexity 
• trends in these variables over time – are things improving over time or becoming even more challenging? 

In addition to information about comparative care of patients of a given maternity, newborn or women’s health service, our reports provide summary analysis to help busy service leaders identify where to focus their time and attention.  Budget managers can focus on the list of top diagnosis groups for which the average costs of care are markedly higher than peers seeing similar women.  We provide both summary analysis and detailed breakdown of cost allocations and outliers to enable you to identify the drivers behind any result which is at odds with peer services.   

Clinical leaders may wish to focus on variations in average length or stay, readmission rates or the women presenting to their service multiple times each year.  The reports include valuable information about differences in the use of procedures for particular diagnoses as well as breakdowns on the relative inputs of staff from different professional disciplines to the care of women with a common diagnosis.  These data provide a useful starting point for local discussions about the drivers behind observed variation and any opportunities for enhancing the care being provided.   

WHA brings insights from our Benchmarking data into many of the discussions member are having through our networking groups.  And we assist staff to connect with relevant peers on common challenges as well as to access information about innovations others have found helpful for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of their women’s & newborn’s services.   

To access your service’s report log in to the member’s community and visit the Benchmarking tab.   

To find out more about our Benchmarking Program contact us.