Key factors influencing the performance of healthcare organizations

Abstract

The study focuses on the definition of key factors influencing the performance of healthcare organizations. In the last decade, hospital organizations have been facing difficulties and challenges in balancing limited resources and costs to provide their demand for services. In face of these tendencies, many hospitals are under pressure to become more cost efficient. The hospital organizations are working as the complex systems of various inputs, tasks, activities and outputs with complicated interactions between individual segments of an organization. These attributes of hospital organizations are a key factor for the managers whose objective is to effectively manage the organization via defined objectives, with limited sources. In this situation it is essential for managers to process the information and knowledge about an organization. This information and knowledge could be provided by advanced management techniques which have to be adopted by an organization. Unfortunately, the majority of hospital organizations do not use any of advanced management techniques at all. The first part of the paper is focused on an analysis of information sources, which could be used by managers to effectively manage an organization. These sources are provided by advanced techniques such as process management, cost management, balanced scorecard, CRM systems and other managerial tools. The following part of the paper analyses the used techniques and defines the key performance factors used in hospital management. The major objective is to outline a model for effective hospital management based on utilization of key management techniques and definition of key factors for successful organization management.