For example, if you calculated the number of ER visits per patient made by patients in a Family Medicine group, you could compare this to other Family Medicine groups, a local Internal Medicine group, all physicians in the city, etc. How you interpret the comparison should be influenced by the differences between your study and the benchmarking studies/populations.

In some cases, benchmarks are not readily available. You may want to reformulate your study to be comparable to available measures (here is where the early planning is important!). If the measure truly is something of importance to the group, you may wish to set a goal based on what the group feels is appropriate and reasonable.

Examples
Click on one of the images to view the example