Designing balanced scorecards in non-profit healthcare organizations : the experience of ambulatório pediátrico do programa Einstein na comunidade de Paraisópolis

During the past decades, scholars have been struggling to develop tools that can help managers to control organizations and improve performance. Among a variety of frameworks designed to fulfil this need, the Balanced Scorecard, by Kaplan and Norton, is definitely the most diffused one, having been implemented by a wide range of organizations in all kinds of different sectors. With the intent of professionalizing its managerial activities, Ambulatório de Paraisópolis, the philanthropic branch of the most modern private hospital in Latin America, decided to design and implement a Performance Measurement System, to track its most important activities and support the massive growth of demand it has been facing across the last years. The aim of this project is to design a Performance Measurement System that suits the needs of this ambulatory. The chosen framework was the Balanced Scorecard, which was developed with the help of the organization’s collaborators through an Action Research methodology. This work describes all the steps performed in order to design and adapt the tool to a Non-Profit Organization, also considering the particularities of the Healthcare sector, and finishes with a discussion on the proposed solution and its implementation.