Despite reporting having more performance measures in
place in 2003 than in 1997, federal managers reported
about the same use of performance information in
management decisions throughout that period, the
Government Accountability Office has said.
The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 laid
a foundation for results-oriented agency planning,
measurement and reporting, said GAO, citing four broad
types of management decisions that performance
Information can be used for: identifying problems and
taking corrective action, developing strategy and
allocating resources, recognizing and rewarding
performance, and identifying and sharing effective approaches.
For example, officials of one Veterans Health Administration
network with facilities in several states responded to the
failure of one facility to meet heart failure performance
targets by changing the process for every facility, according
to GAO-05-927.
It said the VHA network had been at risk of not meeting a
set of cardiovascular performance measures if one of the
facilities did not improve its low score, so it implemented
a new set of data fields in patient records to be filled
out at discharge to track whether patients were given
certain explicit instructions to prevent the need to
return – after that the facility that had missed
performance targets rose to “fully satisfactory” in the
following quarter.
