An internet based system for monitoring patients and relatives' satisfaction rates in health services

Abstract

The aim of the study is to develop an internet based dashboard system for monitoring health key performance indicators (KPI) to improve medical services quality with a benchmarking framework. The study implements "patients and patient relatives' satisfaction rates" of organizations and institutions as a sample KPI. Enterprise Digital Dashboard (EDD) is an effective tool for executives to get a top level view of their corporate. Dashboard systems gather and display KPIs in a centralized system for supporting quality improvement processes. The Ministry of Health of Turkey collects and measures several KPI's in order to improve quality and performance in health-care services. 'Patients and patients relatives' satisfaction rate is one of these KPI's. In this study, we implemented an internet based system for replacing the currently applied paper-based patient satisfaction survey. The collected answers can be measured, benchmarked between hospitals or different departments of the same hospital, and monitored in various dimensions. Our solution has three sub-systems; first system collects survey answers through web forms, second system publishes the survey result as web services, and the last system displays the received KPI values from web services in a dashboard. The new system performs monitoring in various dimensions and benchmarking because the information is stored in a relational database. In current system, only the average satisfaction rate of a hospital is calculated and there is no benchmarking performed on the results. The benchmarking capability of the new solution provides the effective use of the KPI's in quality and performance improvement.|Keywords: key performance indicator (KPI), enterprise digital dashboard (EDD), benchmarking, knowledge management (KM), balanced scorecard (BSC)