Healthcare quarterly (Toronto, Ont.)
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Recently there has been an increasing focus on the role of health innovation as a strategic policy instrument of sustainable economic development. The public nature of our system provides Canada with a unique platform to leverage our investments in health discovery and innovation, while also ensuring that Canadian ideas generate added economic value at home.
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One of the historical challenges in the healthcare system has been the identification and collection of meaningful data to measure an organization's progress towards the achievement of its strategic goals and the concurrent alignment of internal operating practices with this strategy. Over the last 18 months the Toronto East General Hospital (TEGH) has adopted a strategic management system and organizing framework that has led to a metric-based strategic plan. It has allowed for formal and measurable linkages across a full range of internal business processes, from the annual operating plan to resource allocation decisions, to the balanced scorecard and individual performance evaluations. ⋯ This article describes the strategic management system used at TEGH and demonstrates the formal integration of the plan into its operating and decision making processes. It also provides examples of the metrics, their use in decision-making and the variance reporting and improvement mechanisms. The article also demonstrates that a measurement-oriented approach to the planning and delivery of community hospital service is both achievable and valuable in terms of accountability and organizational responsiveness.