Performance Analytics and Incentive Alignment
Design incentive programs that support your compensation philosophy — grounded in peer practices, mission-aligned goals, and well-calibrated targets informed by market benchmarks, time-tested frameworks, and forecasting models. Implement best practices that embed programs within your performance culture and ensure they evolve alongside your organization.
Explore Capabilities
Bridging the Gap Between Mission, Strategy and Incentives
Health care organizations often develop well-defined strategic plans — yet significant variability remains across the industry in how effectively incentive plan goals are aligned with those strategies. Many organizations lack a consistent approach to thoughtfully selecting and defining performance measures, setting targets, and evaluating results relative to peers. Without clear processes and governance, goals may not reflect organizational priorities, performance expectations can vary across the enterprise, and incentive plans lose their power to reinforce accountability. In this environment, leaders need a more structured, data-driven approach — one that directly connects performance measurement to goal setting and compensation outcomes.
Fragmented or Underutilized Data Downsides:
Misaligned Goals
Unclear Accountability
Missed Financial, Clinical & Workforce Outcomes
Partnering with SullivanCotter
Intentional Incentives.
Meaningful Alignment.
SullivanCotter helps health care organizations bring discipline and clarity to performance measurement, goal setting, and incentive design. Leveraging proprietary benchmarking data and deep industry insight, we work with boards and executives to define meaningful performance measures and align them with organizational priorities.
Through a disciplined, collaborative approach, we establish structured goal-setting processes, calibrate performance expectations, and ensure consistency in how performance is measured and evaluated across the enterprise.
By strengthening the connection between mission, strategy and incentives, organizations can improve transparency, reinforce accountability, and support more effective governance and decision-making.
How We Help
Assess organizational performance relative to peers to inform goal setting and incentive design.
Evaluate system and hospital-level performance
Benchmark quality, patient experience, and financial outcomes compared to the same peers used to inform compensation benchmarking
Analyze trends and historical performance
Review performance and compensation alignment
Embed incentive design and refinement into the performance culture.
Engage stakeholders to reaffirm or refine plan design
Facilitate annual and long-term goal development to create contemporary mission-aligned plans
Establish goal-setting calendars, processes, reporting/tracking mechanisms, plan communications and supporting resources/documentation
Understand peer practices in incentive design.
Provide robust peer practices around design (e.g., eligibility, awards, level of accountability, measurement structure)
Share weighting and prevalence across performance domains and measures from over 100 health system incentive plans per year
Synthesize typical incentive plan philosophies, guiding principles and calibration expectations
Engage leaders, committees, and boards in defining plan objectives — and in developing and implementing plans that reflect them.
Review strategic priorities and provide examples of incentive measures aligned to organizational goals
Develop scorecards that define goals, measures,
and weights
Perform rigorous analysis to inform target-setting, drawing on market rates of change and SullivanCotter’s proprietary incentive plan database
Apply forecasting models that predict the probability of goal achievement
Deploy incentive plan toolkits to support the full lifecycle — from design and development to implementation, communication, and change management.
Provide board-ready analytics to support compensation governance
Strengthen transparency and consistency in performance-based rewards
Strengthen the connection between organizational performance and leadership incentives.
Evaluate pay-for-performance relationships for executives and leadership teams
Align incentive programs with strategic performance priorities
Provide board-ready analytics to support compensation governance and decision-making
Insight Spotlight
Aligning Leadership Incentives with Mission and Strategy
Effective incentive programs don’t stand alone — they are built into the performance culture. This video explores how health systems align leadership incentives with organizational strategy to strengthen accountability and sustain performance over time.
“Despite significant investments in strategic planning and incentive design, alignment between the two remains a persistent challenge in health care. The organizations that get this right don’t leave that connection to chance. They build it intentionally, with the right data, the right processes, and the right governance.”
Katherine Falco, Managing Principal, SullivanCotter
Surveys: From Analytics to Real Answers
SullivanCotter’s workforce intelligence transforms industry-leading performance analytics into actionable insights to help propel your organization forward.
Benefits Practices in Health Care Organizations Survey
Uniquely focused on health care organizations, this survey helps address challenges in executive, physician, and employee benefits programs, including optimizing offerings, implementing retirement plans for evolving roles, and keeping pace with trends in paid time off, severance, and disability programs.
Pulse on the Industry
Stay current with SullivanCotter research and thought leadership on performance analytics, leadership incentives, workforce strategy, and organizational performance.
Other Services to Explore
SullivanCotter helps organizations turn insights into action through a range of complementary advisory services. Explore some of the ways we can help you put your analytics to work.
Align Performance, Goals, and Incentives
Ready to strengthen how performance is measured and rewarded? SullivanCotter helps health care organizations design incentive plans, define performance measures, benchmark results against peers, and establish goal-setting processes that align pay with organizational priorities and mission-oriented outcomes.
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