Special issue on Benchmarking in health

Business Process Management Journal

ISSN: 1463-7154

Article publication date: 1 February 2003

262

Citation

(2003), "Special issue on Benchmarking in health", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 9 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bpmj.2003.15709aaa.002

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited


Special issue on Benchmarking in health

"Practical, workable ideas for performance improvement"

Call for papers for a special issue on Benchmarking in health

The motivation for this special issue is to explore the ways in which benchmarking has been employed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care provision.

There are remorseless pressures on health care practitioners and managers to improve services and reduce costs. Internationally, Governments have introduced new systems and practices, including benchmarking, in seeking to control the fiscal burden of health care provision. Benchmarking has been employed in various guises from external cost comparisons through to improvement of healthcare procedures. This special issue aims to draw together evidence of various attempts to use benchmarking practices to understand performance variation in health care and pinpoint ways to greater cost effectiveness in health care provision. Understanding the usefulness of benchmarking at different levels from aggregation of support services, to hospital procedures, to organisational units will lead to better understanding of how to identify best practice in health care and actions for improvement.

Papers are invited for a special issue of Benchmarking: An International Journal (BIJ) on "Benchmarking in health". The aim of this special issue is to investigate how benchmarking can help heathcare organisations to better understand and improve their performance. Theoretical and empirical papers are sought including surveys, and case studies focusing on the tools/techniques used and experiences of benchmarking activities. Contributed papers may deal with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • Best practices in health care.

  • Hospital benchmarking.

  • Benchmarking procedures.

  • Benchmarking health care costs.

  • International comparisons.

  • The impact of league tables.

  • Benchmarking emergency services.

  • Benchmarking of support services.

Enquiries and expressions of interest should be addressed to the Guest Editors. Manuscripts should be 3,000-5,000 words in length, single-spaced and in A4 Word format. All contributions are subjected to a double-blind review. There should be a separate title page giving the names and full addresses of the authors. Manuscripts, following the BIJ guidelines (www.emeraldinsight.com/bij.htm), should be sent as e-mail attachments to the guest editors by no later than 15 September 2003.

Guest Editors for the special issue:

Graham Francis, Senior FellowDepartment of AccountingWaikato Management SchoolWaikato UniversityHamiltonNew ZealandTel: + 64 (0) 7 8562889Fax: + 64 (0) 7 8384332E-mail: gajf@mngt.waikato.ac.nz

Stewart Lawrence, Associate ProfessorDepartment of AccountingWaikato Management SchoolWaikato UniversityHamiltonNew ZealandTel: + 64 (0) 7 8562889Fax: + 64 (0) 7 8384332E-mail: stewartl@mngt.waikato.ac.nz

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