Sometimes patients with the same medical needs receive different courses of treatment, with different outcomes. Why? Because even within the same hospital, lack of appropriate metrics and analytics allow variation in treatment decisions and resulting unpredictability in cost and quality outcomes. If hospital administrators hope to deliver better quality at lower cost, they will need to manage healthcare delivery as a process — including both administrative and clinical decision making.

To help hospital administrators with this challenge, the American Hospital Association‘s Hospital Research & Educational Trust (HRET) worked with NAI to create a new publication titled Health Care Leader Action Guide: Understanding and Managing Variation. This important and timely resource provides best-in-class guidance for understanding and managing variation in inputs and outcomes, steps to consider when launching improvement initiatives, and an extensive list of case studies and sources of best practices. Click here. to learn more and to download the Guide from the Hospital Research & Educational Trust website.