Building a Balanced Scorecard for a burn center

The Balanced Scorecard provides a model that can be adapted to the manageme nt of any burn center, burn service or burn program. This model enables an organization to translate its mission and vision into specific strategic ob jectives across the four perspectives: (1) the financial perspective; (2) t he customer service perspective; (3) the internal business perspective; and (4) the growth and learning perspective. Once the appropriate objectives a re identified, the Balanced Scorecard guides the organization to develop re asonable performance measures and establishes targets, initiatives and alte rnatives to meet programmatic goals and pursue longer-term visionary improv ements. We used the burn center at the University of Colorado Health Scienc es Center to test whether the Balanced Scorecard methodology was appropriat e for the core business plan of a healthcare strategic business unit (i.e. a burn center). (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd and ISBI. All rights reserved .