The Most Important KPIs for Managers in the Healthcare IndustryWhat metrics should your healthcare organisation be tracking?

As a manager in the healthcare industry, there is a lot of data you need to be aware of in order to ensure that your organisation is running as smoothly as possible.

You’ll also need data to make sure that your patients are receiving the best possible care and that your staff are content.

Knowing the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) is vital for your healthcare facility’s overall performance.

In this article, we’re going to explain what key performance indicators are and go through the most important KPIs for managers in the healthcare industry.

What are key performance indicators?

Key performance indicators are crucial for any type of business or organisation, no matter what your goals are.

They are a quantifiable metric to measure how well you’re working towards a goal.

KPIs are the targets you make to help you achieve your business goals. Tracking your KPIs and taking action based on the information you find will help you achieve success.

An example of a key performance indicator might be “new patients per month”. Clearly, attracting new patients is important, but there might be an upper limit on this as well, as you don't want to end up with more patients than you can serve!

Once you have your target laid out, you can track your progress to highlight whether you’re meeting your goals, enabling you to take action if necessary.

The best way to define your goals is to set the larger target you want to reach within a certain period of time. Then, you can create a step-by-step plan that will allow you to achieve that goal within your defined timescale.

It’s important that you keep track of your progress as you work through your plan to make sure it’s working so that you can make any necessary changes.

Most important KPIs for managers in the healthcare industry

Whether you’re a manager in a hospice, GP surgery, or hospital, we’ve outlined eight of the most important KPIs that you should be using in the healthcare industry.

Cancelled/missed appointments

The first KPI to keep track of patients’ appointments and how many appointments have been missed or cancelled. Over 15 million GP appointments were missed in 2018.

A high number of missed appointments can have astronomical financial implications on health facilities. Knowing this data will help you gain an understanding of the impact cancelled and missed appointments are having on the business.

It will also highlight if you need to put any procedures in place to reduce the number of cancelled or missed appointments.

Staff-to-patient ratio

Keeping track of this will ensure you have enough staff to care for your patients. Equally, it makes it less likely that you’ll put on more employees than you need, protecting you against wasting money through unnecessary staffing.

Patient waiting time

Monitoring and reducing waiting times will increase patient satisfaction and help your organisation to operate efficiently.

Patient satisfaction

Analyse your patients’ satisfaction. Having a questionnaire you give to your patients after a stay or an appointment is the best way to gain insight into how your facility is running. This will highlight key areas that require improvement to ensure your patients are happy.

Patient follow-up rates

Make sure that you follow up with your patients after appointments and stays. This will help you identify any issues with your service and highlight any areas that need improvement.

Doing this can also check up on how your patients are doing without them having to come in for an appointment, especially for patients with long-term conditions.

From 2018 to 2021, the percentage of patients who felt that their local healthcare facility supported them enough with their long-term conditions fell from 43% to 37%.

Patient treatment costs

Another important KPI is to calculate how much the treatment of each patient costs your facility. This can make it easier for you to budget and plan further investment in treatment options.

Hourly staffing costs

It’s also a good idea to calculate the cost of your staff per hour. You can compare this to your income to calculate if you’re spending more than you’re bringing in to work out where you may need to reallocate resources.

Number of patients seen per period/per staff member

Working out how many patients are seen per defined period—by doctors or other staff members—will give insight into how often your patients are seen.

This will let you know if patient time needs to be decreased to make sure that each patient is seen to, or if the time can be increased.


Keeping track of KPIs is extremely important for your healthcare facility. Doing so will help you to run your organisation in the most efficient way possible and your patients and staff will be left happy.


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