KPIs With Targets

Most care organisations can produce numbers. Far fewer can say whether a number is good. A monthly report that shows 86% task coverage tells you nothing on its own: you need to know what you were aiming for, whether it is moving the right way, and who or what is behind the gap. Without that, reporting becomes a ritual rather than a decision.

Read+Respond starts from the target. Every measure can carry one — a value to beat, or a band to stay inside — and each figure is judged against it as on track, at risk or off track, with an explicit "no target set" for measures you are watching rather than managing. Because the verdict is worked out at the moment you read it rather than stored, correcting a target re-colours the history consistently instead of leaving old months judged against a number nobody remembers setting. The board opens on what is failing: a short "needs attention" list, not a wall of tiles.

Then it gives you the movement. Every figure shows this period against the previous one — this month versus last month, this quarter versus last quarter — and six periods of history behind that, so a bad month reads as a blip or a trend rather than a surprise. A period that is still running is labelled as such: the figure is real but incomplete. Where there is not enough underneath a number to judge anybody fairly, it is withheld rather than published, in the chart as well as the tile.

Goals are the commitment version of the same idea, and they are set on a person, a client, a facility or the organisation. A goal has a measure, a target, a window — a number of times in total, every week or fortnight, most days, or days in a row — a baseline captured once so progress cannot be quietly erased, and checkpoints to review it against. Progress resolves from the work your team is already recording, so nothing has a status field for anyone to keep up to date; on track, at risk and off track are derived from where the goal actually stands.

When the number raises a question, you drill into the records behind it — the actual rows, with the rules that produced the figure spelled out — subject to exactly the same permissions that guard those records everywhere else. Measures you cannot buy off the shelf, you write: count how often a task is ticked off, average what your staff record on it, or divide one measure by another to make a rate, without waiting for a release. And alongside all of it sits the report suite for the questions a single figure cannot answer — staff workload, task coverage, platform adoption, medication schedules and wastage, registers, facility jobs, form counts and form responses.