Background: Benchmarking is one of the methods used in business that is applied to hospitals to improve the management of their operations. International comparison between hospitals can explain performance differences. As there is a trend towards specialization of hospitals, this study examines the benchmarking process and the success factors of benchmarking in international specialized cancer...

How can local officials select benchmarking partners whose best practices have the most potential for applicability and success in improving service performance? This study suggests the process for selecting the most appropriate benchmarking partners and for making fair performance comparisons will be advanced if local officials initially address the issue of what level of input service quality...

Cloud computing is a new paradigm for using ICT services— only when needed and for as long as needed, and paying only for service actually consumed. Benchmarking the increasingly many cloud services is crucial for market growth and perceived fairness, and for service design and tuning. In this work, we propose a generic architecture for benchmarking cloud services. Motivated by recent demand fo...

In 2004 the Australian Flexible Learning Framework developed a suite of quantitative and qualitative indicators on the uptake, use and impact of e-learning in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. These indicators were used to design items for a survey to gather quantitative data for benchmarking. A series of four surveys gathered data from VET providers, teachers, students and th...

Describes the aims, reasons for development, key features, and uniqueness of an on-line Benchmarking and Performance Improvement Resource. The paper begins by describing the historical context within which the website has been developed. It describes the growth in the use of business excellence, benchmarking and performance measurement, and how these improvement approaches are related to each o...

Benchmarking of clinical laboratory activities has become a tool used increasingly to enable administrators and managers to obtain an independent evaluation of the performance of the laboratory and identify opportunities for improvement. Benchmarking is particularly important because of the diversity and complexity of the various sections of the laboratory. The critical component of laboratory ...

OBJECTIVE Health care quality monitoring has been introduced in cystic fibrosis (CF) by a few groups and national registries. Based upon this, continuous quality improvement can be achieved by applying the benchmarking method which is focused on learning from best practice. SETTING A group of 12 CF centres in Germany, treating a total of 1200 patients of all ages, enrolled in a nationwide pil...

Porting of the parallel Fortran preprocessor, Pfortran, to Intel Corporation and IBM Corporation massively parallel processor machines is presented. The machines include the Intel iPSC/SSO, the Caltech Intel DELTA, the Intel Paragon, and the IBM SPl. The UHGROMOS molecular dynamics program, a version of GROMOS ported to parallel machines through the use of Pfortran, was used as a test applicati...

Benchmarking energy-efficiency is an important tool to promote the efficient use of energy in commercial buildings. Benchmarking models are mostly constructed in a simple benchmark table (percentile table) of energy use, which is normalized with floor area and temperature. This paper describes a benchmarking process for energy efficiency by means of multiple regression analysis, where the relat...

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations recommends national and regional benchmarking in the quality improvement process. Benchmarking is comparing your organization's patient care process outcomes to the best. This communication describes a national benchmarking process for peer comparison of indicators in perfusion patient services process improvement. A databasing ...