Using dashboards in a hospital facility are very useful in managing many of the key sides of medical operations and that also guarantee care providers are fairly compensated while the quality of patient care is continued. capturing information that provides real-time process and cycle data as two of the important benefits of using dashboards. This cycle data gives our nurses, doctors, allied professionals and executive managers the ability to advance ALOS and properly schedule the ideal amount of time for patient care.
The types of dashboards that are most effective depend on the needs of the facility, and of which they are used. Two of the most famous and effective dashboards I have seen include executive dashboards and the ER dashboard (like the EmEx Dashboard).
For example, EmEX dashboard is designed to:
- Monitor and benchmark emergency department performance.
- Track dozens of performance indicators – customized to show you the information you want.
- Provide interactive graphs and reports.
- Drill down by physician, nurse, date, time
- Provide easy to use – no training required
- Runs on your web browser – no capital needed
- Built on SAP/Business Objects, the industry leading Business Intelligence software.
“Many health systems suffer from having too little data to identify significant quality improvement opportunities, while others suffer from the confusion of having too much.”—(Byrnes, 2012).
However, in order to meet the issue of data overload of an executive dashboard, many healthcare systems, according to Byrnes (2012), have developed executive-level dashboards that include composite measures, or rollups of detailed dashboards that contain 20, 3o, or sometimes 40 measures. The most well-known example is the “appropriate care score,” which is a composite measure for all of the core measures.
It is also critical to understand that in terms of quality improvement, other forms of dashboards have been created as a way for clinicians and healthcare professionals to monitor patient care. I think dashboards offer an excellent way to pull internal reports and analyze the day-to-day quality of care. For example, a key benefit of a clinical quality dashboard is that they are an easy clinical decision and an aide to use. I like the way some dashboards are assembled and created because some organizations assemble a large number of performance measures and present this information in the form of a dashboard—somewhat similar to an automobile or airplane instrument panel. In many cases though, these dashboards are only made available to the senior managers in the organization, not the other way around. Unfortunately, the plethora of measures displayed on the dashboard typically is not carefully selected nor has the organization tried to understand whether a fundamental relationship exists among these performance measures. Some dashboards are usually geared more toward the creation of general awareness and focus than used for operational and performance management. The patterns revealed that greater hospital quality was linked to shorter, more focused dashboards, active use of dashboards for operations management, and strong influence of board quality committees in dashboard content and implementation.
References:
Emergency Excellence. (n.d.). EmEx Dashboard. Retried April 9, 2013 from http://www.emergencyexcellence.com/emergency-department-dashboard.html
Byrnes, J. (October, 2012). Driving value: solving the issue of data overload with anexecutive dashboard. Consumer Health Complete, 66(10), P116-118
