Incorporating balanced scorecards into the patient journey modeling process

![CDATA[Background: Improving the quality of healthcare is of critical importance, not only in Australia, but in every Health Care Organisation (HCO) worldwide. Patient Journey Modelling is a relatively recent innovation in healthcare quality improvement that models the patient’s movement through the HCO by viewing it from a patient centric perspective. This modelling process however cannot occur in isolation, the strategy of the HCO must also be considered to ensure conformance to agreed performance criteria. Healthcare strategy includes objectives, goals and measurement criteria as set by the relevant provider’s board as well as legislation, government and provider policies and relevant professional body guidelines, viz, drug dispensary guidelines. These must be funneled into the patient journey definition so that complimentary operational measurement criteria can be defined and the resulting redesigned workflows can track them and provide feedback to management. The use of Balanced Scorecards is a proven management science technique for integrating business strategy into the process redesign activity, in this case the redesign of the patient journey. Objectives: This paper will suggest how the HCO strategy can be incorporated into the Patient Journey Modeling process via the use of Balanced Scorecards. A primary care midwifery case study will provide examples where appropriate. Methods: The research uses a constructive research process enriched by aspects of a participatory action research environment. Results: The case study shows that Balanced Scorecards can be used to incorporate HCO strategy into the Patient Journey Modeling process. Goals can be defined using the four balanced scorecard perspectives and measurement criteria elicited for inclusion in the redesigned patient journey model. Discussion and conclusions: This work contributes to the patient journey modeling domain by providing a framework for incorporating the HCO strategy and related measurement definitions into the quality improvement process. Additional application to other case study and clinical environments is needed to further test the Balanced Scorecard approach in a variety of patient journey scenarios.]]