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Healthcare Management vocabulary · Quality and Accreditation

KPI

Meaning in healthcare management, with examples

/ˌkeɪ piː ˈaɪ/abbreviationCore term

In healthcare management, KPI means: Short for key performance indicator: a measurable value, such as waiting time or infection rate, that shows how well a hospital or team is meeting its goals.

In Turkish: temel performans göstergesi, performans göstergesi, KPI

How it is used

Said letter by letter, and often plural: KPIs. Managers set, track, report and hit their KPIs, often on a monthly dashboard shown to the board. Typical hospital KPIs include length of stay, bed occupancy, waiting times and patient satisfaction.

Example sentences

  1. Our main KPI for the emergency department is the share of patients who leave it within four hours.

  2. Let's go through the KPIs on the dashboard before the board meeting.

Common collocations

  • set KPIs
  • track KPIs
  • meet a KPI
  • KPI dashboard
  • KPI target
  • benchmarkA standard or result, often from other hospitals or national data, that you compare your own performance with.
  • quality improvementA planned, continuous effort to make care safer, more effective and more efficient by measuring results, testing changes and learning from them.
  • length of stayThe number of days a patient spends in hospital from admission to discharge; the average across many patients is a key efficiency measure.
  • bed occupancy rateThe percentage of a hospital's available beds that are filled by patients over a given period, used to judge how busy the hospital is.
  • waiting timeThe time a patient has to wait for care, for example from arrival to being seen in the emergency department, or from referral to surgery.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Quality and Accreditation

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This page explains English vocabulary for learners. It is not medical advice.