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Program Benchmarking Coming Soon

By Lydia S. Middleton, MBA, CAE posted 02-13-2012 12:01

  
As Peter has shared in his column, the AUPHA Board and Staff have been hard at work moving a number of initiatives forward. One of these is an area of activity that we’ve titled “Defining the Field.” Within that area of work are two distinct projects. The first is one I detailed in the Fall 2011 Exchange—Defining a Body of Knowledge for Healthcare Management Education. The second is equally exciting and in many ways more pragmatic approach to defining the field. We are in the process of developing a program survey and benchmark platform that will allow programs to compare their own statistics and performance against that of their peer programs in aggregate.

This new platform, which will be called Benchmarking for Healthcare Management Education (BEHM), will be available for free to all AUPHA Full, Associate Candidate and Associate member programs. Via the platform, programs will be able to submit their annual program survey information, then compare the data you’ve supplied to the data supplied by other programs that meet a specific search criteria. The minimum number of peers against which a program can compare itself has not yet been finalized by the task force developing the platform, but will likely be 7-9 which is the standard in this type of benchmarking platform.

The system will then generate a variety of reports that will allow you to see how you compare to other programs. For example, you could look at how your application numbers compare to other masters degree programs in schools of public health that are in public universities. Or you could assess how your program’s internship requirement compares to that of other AUPHA Certified bachelors programs. Your program’s information will never be visible to other users of the system. It may be aggregated for comparison purposes, but at no point would another program be able to see what one single program has entered.

In addition, we will be loading the data that you provided for your 2010-11 survey into the system so that you can compare your numbers last year to this year. And to the extent we can, we will minimize the need for you to enter repetitive data that will remain the same year over year which has been a complaint about previous annual survey mechanisms.

There will be a certain expectation that a program has to “pay to play.” While the service is free to all members, a program can only access the comparison data once it has completed the survey with its own data. We hope that this will drive participation, because the system will only be as good as the quality and quantity of the data in it, and for that we need program participation.

This platform will generate tremendous data about our programs and the field. This data is used not only by programs and AUPHA, but by outside organizations such as ACHE, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Department of Education. We will also make the aggregate data about the field available to others at a fee.

In addition to the data provided through the BEHM platform, AUPHA is looking forward to having significant data available through HAMPCAS once the application cycle is completed. HAMPCAS participating programs will be able to access reports for applicants to their own programs on the following:
  • Ages
  • Citizenship Status
  • Countries of Birth
  • Degrees Awarded
  • Degrees Expected
  • Ethnicities and Races
  • Genders
  • GPAS by Academic Level
  • GPAs by Subject
  • Majors
  • States of Residence
The Benchmarking for Healthcare Management Education platform will be beta-tested in the spring and debuted at the 2012 AUPHA Annual Meeting on May 31 in Minneapolis and available to all programs at that time. If you are interested in serving as a beta test site, please let me know at lmiddleton@aupha.org.


Draft View of the Benchmarking Site
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