Hospital process orientation (HPO): The development of a measurement tool

This paper looks at how process orientation can be measured using data from one large European University hospital. After a restructuring in divisions and the implementation of the care programs and clinical pathways, hospital management came to the conclusion that they had no tools to evaluate if these changes were resulting in a process orientation on the work-floor. In agreement with hospital management, an existing tool of business process orientation measurement was adopted and adapted to the specific context of healthcare. This paper reports on how the measurement tool was changed and validated in order to come up with a useful instrument to measure the process orientation of the employees in the hospital. The Hospital Process Orientation (HPO) tool can be useful to measure the effects of changes which are assumed to lead to more process-orientation or even patient focus. In this way the pay-off of these investments can be made more tangible. The HPO tool offers hospitals a way to evaluate how they are evolving towards more process orientation.