Process improvement involves the business practice of identifying, analyzing and improving existing business processes to optimize performance, meet best practice standards or simply improve quality and the user experience for customers and end-users. Process improvement strategies strive to minimize errors, reduce waste, improve productivity and streamline efficiency.

The County Clerk-Recorder records average customer wait-time for the official records, vital records, fictitious business name, marriages, passports, and other services the Clerk- Recorder provides to County residents.

The Pavement Condition measure is commonly used in the pavement maintenance profession to indicate the condition on roads for the purpose of usability, lifespan, programming capital investments, measuring the cost liability of the road system. County roads are graded using a standardized method consistently utilized throughout the Bay Area cities and counties. The data is recorded as Pavement Condition Index (PCI). The PCI numerical rating for the condition of the roads is on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst possible condition and 100 is the best. PCI is used to develop budgets, identify preventive maintenance schedules and strategies, evaluate materials and designs, and provide a historical condition of the road.

The Department of Planning and Development collects and records the time it takes to process planning land use entitlements/permit and building/grading permits (entitlements) from the date of application to approval, to issuance.

In an effort to reduce the population of homeless pets entering local animal shelters, the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Management aims to increase the accessibility of affordable spay/neuter services for both owned and homeless pets in the county. The Department generates and reports the numbers of surgeries performed by County staff to determine the percent change from the prior year.

The total travel time measure illustrates the performance of the expressway system in moving traffic. The County invests in the expressway system through its Capital Improvement Program. Generally, capital investments in the expressway are either designed to improve safety for users and/or improve carrying capacity. County Roads records the sum of all travel time on all eight county expressways (in both directions) and total number of vehicle trips per day on expressways.

The Behavioral Health Services Department (BHSD) continues to work on reducing the use of inpatient psychiatric hospital services for adult and older adult consumers diagnosed with mental health related problems. The readmission rate measures the unplanned readmissions of clients who have been discharged from acute psychiatric hospitals within the past 30 days. BHSD has implemented a practice management solution to improve data captured at the Barbara Aarons Pavilion and contract hospitals to allow for more efficient intervention.

Valley Health Plan (VHP) records and collects the vacancy and retention rate of its staff to as part of its resources improvement, recruitment, and retention goals.

The Privacy Office seeks to promote and coordinate enterprise privacy initiatives across the County and strives to balance our growing need to share information with our responsibility to protect it, while elevating the County’s privacy posture.

In Fiscal Year 2020-2021, the Privacy Office intends to acquire the tools and resources necessary to build a baseline of privacy risks, identifying the most prevalent and high-risk areas to focus our efforts.  With a baseline established, in future fiscal years, the Privacy Office will identify and deploy targeted remediation activities to determine the measure of success in reducing privacy risks.

This measure displays current ambulance patient offload time in all County hospitals. The Department will reduce current ambulance patient offload time in all hospitals to 20 minutes or less (measured at the 90th percentile) by June 2023. This will improve the customer experience, the efficient allocation of resources, and timely access to EMS services. On a monthly basis, the Department will determine the 90th percentile for all ambulance offload times in the County by measuring time from the ambulance arrival at the hospital until the hospital assumes care.