Assisting allied health in performance evaluation: a systematic review

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Allied Health Professions
• Performance Measurement

Background:

• Allied health practitioners face challenges in performance evaluation, lacking a unified approach to measure or monitor service performance.
• Existing literature lacks a comprehensive framework for evaluating allied health clinical service performance.
• This review addresses the need for a structured approach to performance evaluation in allied health.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the literature on healthcare performance evaluation.
• To identify core elements, tools, and barriers for establishing an allied health performance evaluation framework.
• To guide the measurement and evaluation of allied health clinical service performance.

Main Methods:

• Systematic literature review across five electronic databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsychInfo, Academic Search Premier).
• Inclusion of articles on allied health performance evaluation and general healthcare performance.
• Content analysis used for synthesizing findings from 37 included articles.

Main Results:

• Performance evaluation involves prioritizing clinical areas, setting goals, selecting measures, identifying feedback sources, conducting measurements, and reporting results.
• Effective performance evaluation is multi-dimensional, requiring diverse data perspectives for a comprehensive assessment.
• Various tools and instruments are available for data collection to ensure a rich understanding of healthcare quality.

Conclusions:

• While allied health systems have unique needs, core processes can form a framework for performance evaluation.
• Addressing and overcoming barriers to performance evaluation is essential for achieving desired outcomes.
• Findings support the development of a standardized framework for allied health performance measurement and evaluation, with future research on its impact.