The Process of Benchmarking Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Process of Benchmarking - Term Paper Example The purpose of this paper is to examine how the process of benchmarking is important in financial decision making. An online quantitative research study of Jackson Health Care title Nurses downtime 2011 survey elucidates various aspects of benchmarking. This survey offers information that can be used by other organizations for comparison. Factors for comparison outlined in this survey include time spent in indirect care, issues that affect bedside nurse, recommendations on how to increase time spent on patients bedsides, job satisfaction among nurses, and ways to improve job satisfaction. Jackson Health Care has implemented strategies to improve these areas between 2009 and 2011and hence offers a credible basis for comparison. This article informed my understanding of benchmarking in that inequalities in relation to performance gaps are prevalent in healthcare and identifying these variances can help align processes in low performing institutions with those in organizations that perform highly. Subsequently, this article informed my understanding in that benchmarking can either be internal or external. External benchmarking is what is denoted as comparing the processes of an institution with another. Benchmarking involves the creation of specific objectives that ought to be achieved in a healthcare organization to achieve high levels of performance. In my organization, benchmarking can be used to assess the existing strategies under implementation and as mentioned earlier, compare them with those in other similar organizations. During this process, financial data relating to other organizations are collected and analyzed. It is only through this process that what needs to be done to improve performance in terms of finances can be identified and achieved in my organization. As Baker and Baker (2014) points out, "Benchmarking is used for opportunity assessment" (p. 220). In other words, benchmarking can help my organization to identify opportunities and