A prerequisite for a successul benchmarking study is to have a Total Quality Management system in place within the organization. Modern quality management entails customer satisfaction, it prefers prevention against inspection and it recognizes the managerial team’s responsibility for quality.
In healthcare, performance measurement is very important as many lives depend on the doctors’ performance, and therefore, process perfection should be promoted in this domain, together with productivity. Moreover, the hospital administration needs to know where the hospital is heading; they have to plan the budget, thus being important to consider how much money to invest in research or innovation, for instance, and how much to allocate for medicines or equipment. Furthermore, the mission of the organization should be always kept in mind, just like patient outcomes, which are a way of reflecting the image of the hospital.