NUR 621 Balanced Scorecard
Balanced Scorecard
A health care organization’s success depends, to a significant extent, on its leadership and management approaches. In the current competitive business environment, health care organizations should evaluate their performance holistically and respond as conditions prompt. Successful evaluation and response hinge on the methods and tools that organizational leaders apply to gather data and inform decision-making. Since progressive performance requires organizations to address all the factors that influence performance, a holistic view of the organization’s performance against the strategic goals is critical. A balanced scorecard (BSC) is a widely used strategic management tool. To understand its relevance in health care, this paper discusses how and why strategic measures are displayed in a balanced scorecard.
Purpose and Explanation of Its Use to Lead and Manage an Organization
Health care facilities should grow in all dimensions to improve efficiency, meet client needs, and overcome market pressures. This growth requires organizations to apply tools that guide them toward accomplishing their strategic goals. Tawse and Tabesh (2023) defined the BSC as a multipurpose management tool for enhancing strategy implementation effectiveness. It plays this valuable role by providing timely and multilayered feedback about the status of internal business processes and external outcomes. This feedback is critical to improving an organization’s strategic performance and results.
A BSC is used to lead and manage an organization by helping it to express and act upon its vision and strategy. Amer et al. (2022) alluded that the organizational vision and strategy steer all the perspectives in a BSC. Within health care organizations, leaders and managers should formulate measures that guide them in achieving goals and sustaining performance. A BSC ensures leaders and managers understand the organization’s performance from multiple dimensions, not predominantly from the financial perspective. The balanced view is the foundation of strategic management since actionable measures can be implemented to achieve goals that align with an organization’s broader vision and strategy (Gazi et al., 2022). Such alignment ensures performance excellence, regular data-driven reviews, and focused attention on areas that drive organizational growth.
Indicators Selected for a Balanced Scorecard Health care organizations committed to channeling their energy to achieve long-term strategic goals should apply all the BSC’s elements to evaluate and drive performance. The same applies to NewYork-Presbyterian, a leading academic health system that provides innovative care and conducts clinical research in New York City and beyond (NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, 2025). The financial perspective of a BSC should be a priority area when developing actionable steps to achieve New-York Presbyterian strategy and vision. From a strategic management dimension, the financial perspective focuses on satisfying stakeholders’ interests and is a reliable indicator of an organization’s financial stability (Bshayreh et al., 2024). Consequently, the organization must examine whether its practices, partnerships, and decisions help it to make good returns on investment. The customer indicator may also be selected for a BSC specific to NewYork-Presbyterian. The customer perspective focuses on customer experience and perceptions (American Society for Quality, 2025). It is a critical indicator since clients (patients) pay money to cover the organization’s costs, which produces profits. In turn, as Bshayreh et al. (2024) emphasized, organizations must focus on serving the customers’ needs and desires. As a strategic management methodology, a BSC demonstrates the association between the organization’s commodities and services (finished items) and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it can help NewYork-Presbyterian to determine whether it serves customers excellently through items that add value, which suggests positive perceptions. Other indicators relevant to the organization’s strategic management include the internal operations as well as the learning and growth perspectives. This aspect is indispensable in a BSC specific to NewYork-Presbyterian since the organization’s key processes should meet customer and stockholder requirements. A suitable obligation to meet these requirements is implementing measures to reduce defective products and service problems significantly (Bshayreh et al. 2024). The learning and growth component is primarily about promoting ongoing change and continuous improvement. Therefore, the organization should prioritize this dimension by developing strategic measures/interventions to improve and change its capabilities (Amer et al., 2022; Bshayreh et al., 2024). Practical measures include product enhancements and integrating innovative service delivery techniques. NewYork-Presbyterian can evaluate this indicator by determinants like value-added per nursing staff, training hours, and employees’ productivity.
Tools and Techniques
Displaying BSC data necessitates tools and techniques that represent information on the four indicators in detail. Therefore, the data should be presented from the four BSC perspectives, visualize strategic objectives, and be clear and user-friendly to inform decision-making. A reliable quantitative data displaying method is a bar graph. Bar graphs can effectively represent data grouped into categories or provided as values. In a BSC, such data include performance across various indicators, such as financial stability, market share, and growth progress against the set strategic targets. An appropriate qualitative tool for displaying BSC data in a health care facility is a strategy map. The primary purpose of a formal strategy map is to visualize the cause-and-effect links between an organization’s strategic objectives and supporting processes (Evans, 2025; Tawse & Tabesh, 2023). For instance, if the strategic objective is to enhance learning and growth, a strategy map identifies the supporting processes, such as supporting top research and training programs for employees.
Driving Quality Improvement
The BSC can be used to drive quality improvement in NewYork-Presbyterian by providing insight into the organization’s performance. As Gazi et al. (2022) argued, performance is the effectiveness and efficiency of a system that produces the desired results. The BSC can be used in performance improvement to reduce the gap between the present (current output) and best quality outcomes. In a health care setting, quality can be achieved by interventions that improve the internal perspective of the BSC, like working as a team, enabling seamless care, and integrating innovative processes (Amer et al., 2022). Through the BSC, the management gets accurate and timely insights into areas that should be addressed to optimize performance. Response through evidence-based interventions reduces quality-related gaps.
Conclusion
Effective management and high performance in health care are usually data-driven areas. The importance of data-based insights obliges health care leaders and managers to use appropriate tools to quantify and visualize performance, such as a BSC. NewYork-Presbyterian requires a BSC to guide strategic management and continuous improvement. A BSC provides a holistic view of an organization’s performance from four dimensions: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth. A BSC specific for NewYork-Presbyterian should have all four indicators to ensure all strategic management areas are evaluated and appropriate action plans are formulated to accomplish the organization’s vision and strategy.
References
Amer, F., Hammoud, S., Khatatbeh, H., Lohner, S., Boncz, I., & Endrei, D. (2022). The deployment of balanced scorecard in health care organizations: is it beneficial? a systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 22, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07452-7
American Society for Quality. (2025). What is a balanced scorecard? https://asq.org/quality-resources/balanced-scorecard?srsltid=AfmBOop0SN2H8GIwEeEj5ZL3AvuL29l3M0r-gGld4v3UccTRrgp0NUIP
Bshayreh, M. M., Qawqzeh, H. K., Al-Momany, I. A. A., Saleh, M. M. A., & Al Qallap, K. D. H. (2024). The Influence of balanced scorecard perspectives on the firms’ performance: Evidence from the banks in the developing market. Corporate & Business Strategy Review, 5(2), 243–254. https://doi.org/10.22495/cbsrv5i2art21
Evans, E. (2025). Project strategy maps. Publifye AS.
Gazi, F., Atan, T., & Kılıç, M. (2022). The assessment of internal indicators on the balanced scorecard measures of sustainability. Sustainability, 14(14), 8595. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14148595
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. (2025). About us. https://www.nyp.org/about
Tawse, A., & Tabesh, P. (2023). Thirty years with the balanced scorecard: What we have learned. Business Horizons, 66(1), 123-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2022.03.005
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Assessment Description
The purpose of this assignment is to display an understanding of how and why strategic measures are displayed in a balanced scorecard.
Select a health care organization with which you are familiar. Using this organization as your setting, write a 1,000– to 1,250-word essay addressing the following:
- Explain what the purpose of a balanced scorecard (BSC) is. How is the balanced scorecard used to lead and manage an organization?
- Discuss the indicators that may be selected for a BSC specific to your selected organization. Be sure to describe the rationale for your choices.
- Describe the tools and techniques that you would use to analyze and display your data. Select at least one quantitative and one qualitative method or tool.
- Discuss how the BSC can be used to drive quality improvement.
Include 3–4 peer-reviewed resources.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
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