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f you look at many hospitals ’ websites and other resources they make publicly available, you will often see charts, graphs or tables showing hospital performance on some metric compared with a national standard. An example is Table 1, which was taken from a hospital website and compares patient satisfac-tion in numerous areas with the national average. The hospital highlighted the areas in which it exceeded the national average. The term “benchmarking ” is often mentioned in hospital quality literature, but the process of bench-marking is often misunderstood. True benchmark-ing is not simply comparing outcome measures with industry averages. ASQ defines benchmarking as “a technique in which a company measures its performance against that of best in class companies, determines how those companies achieved their performance levels and uses the information to improve its own perfor