Time to Healthcare Service Metric

Time to Healthcare Service Overview

The Time to Healthcare Service KPI measures your organization's ability to provide incoming patients with healthcare service in a timely manner. This KPI should measure multiple services that your patients will receive after admittance, such as the time it takes to see a nurse or physician or how long it takes to be discharged. Awareness of wait-time trends and the current situation will allow healthcare providers to make educated decisions on a variety of needs, such as staffing, budgeting, and equipment allocation.

Incoming patients expect to receive healthcare service in a reasonable timeframe. This KPI can be used as a leading indicator for patient satisfaction, as poor service times will negatively impact your patient's experience. When developing this KPI, ensure you are accounting for different categories of patient visits; for instance, an emergency room will have a much shorter time to service than a walk-in clinic because of the urgency associated with each type of visit.

See also

• ER Waiting Times
• Number of Patients in ER
• Current ER Occupancy

Monitoring Healthcare KPIs on a Dashboard

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for Time to Healthcare Service, you’ll want to establish processes for monitoring this and other healthcare KPIs. Dashboards can be critical in this regard. Read more.