Applying Quality Improvement Methods to Improve the Financial Performance of Local Public Health Agencies

The use of financial and operational ratios has proven to be an effective method to monitor and report on the acquisition, management, and use of financial resources in healthcare and higher educational settings. Some local public health agencies around the nation are now beginning to use their financial data to populate a set of financial ratios developed specifically for local public health agencies. In addition to monitoring their financial and operational performance and using the results to inform short and long-term financial and service delivery decisions, these ratios can be compared across similar public health agencies to identify potential gaps in performance. For example, variability in revenue, expenditure, and program categories can be viewed across multiple public health agencies with common community or organizational characteristics. Analysis such as this can used to strategically develop and prioritize public health quality improvement programs by providing insights into operational gaps identified through routine financial analysis practices. This session will demonstrate this technique while showing how it can be used with the Aims for quality improvement in the HHS Consensus Statement on Quality and other quality improvement models. Also, methods will be applied for achieving improvement in quality by demonstrating how to a) conduct a gap analysis using financial ratio data, b) identify an aim based on the gap analysis, c) establish measures to monitor changes and improvements in the financial performance of public health agencies, and d) select changes based on evidence or expert based financial practices.