Do You Have an Ideal Clinical Dashboard?

SUMMARY:

• Data drives much of healthcare, but more data does not always mean better and more actionable insights.

• Clinical Dashboards highlight the most important trends and results for clinicians to allow them to engage in change.

• Clinical dashboards need to ensure the correct data is measured and displayed without too much “noise” (irrelevant or too much data).

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REVIEW

The Purpose of a Clinical Dashboard is to Provide Insight into 3 Categories:

•  Performance Improvement on practice areas to address

• Quality and Safety – track agreed upon clinical guidelines and benchmarks

• Management and Operations – department level data to support day to day functions and care services

  The Value of Clinical Dashboards are to:

• Integrate disparate and poorly organized data into an easy to understand format.

• Aggregate data into a centralized location

• Highlight the essential metrics for greatest opportunity of improvement based on important trends.

  Goals of a Clinical Dashboard are to Easily Depict:

•  What happened

• Why it happened

• What may happen

• What action should be taken

Your ideal dashboard should be able to answer all of the above items

Differences between a dashboart, detailed report and data visualization

Ideal Clinical Dashboard

1.       Can the dashboard provide easily assessable quality clinical data?

• Assess the need to maintain or change clinical direction

• Provide the correct fidelity of data (volume, frequency, duration of collection) to draw conclusions

• Is the data presented as patient disease severity adjusted allowing cross unit comparisons

2.      Appropriate format of current comparisons used within the dashboard

• Benchmark:

  • Useful to compare one site to another

  • Should highlight a change in direction

• Historic Comparisons – evaluate data delivered in the recent past

• Standards are met:

  •  Used to assess quality of care expectations

  • Based on standards from accreditation body, own organization goals, or both.

  • Compare your performance data to agreed upon goals

3.      Control Charts

• ·Helps to identify data outside an accepted zone

• Typically classified as excellent; acceptable; needs follow up

Common Clinical Dashboard Mistakes:

• Lack of real time or high quality data

• Clear goal(s) of Dashboard not established

• Too many KPIs per Dashboard

• Incorrect representation of data

• Cluttered, confusing or too much data

• Lack of patient severity adjustment to compare across

• Data not grouped logically

Ideal Dashboard Design Considerations:

• Meaningful/actionable data and insights to provider

• Clinical indicators based on widely accepted, published standards/guidelines

• Couple reported data with other relevant information:

  • Patient context

  • Predictive algorithms

  • Clinical decision support algorithms

• ·Easily interpreted performance data of individual or team performance

CONCLUSIONS:

• Clinical dashboards take data from different sources and aggregate them into easy to read and interpret insights.

• When done correctly, clinical dashboards area useful for monitoring, measuring and analyzing relevant data.