Clinical dashboards can be described as visualization tools to house healthcare data. They can include both quantitative and qualitative information and can be static or interactive. Clinical dashboards could report key metrics such as: ER wait times, patient satisfaction & average length of hospital stay.
An effectively designed dashboard should be able to answer a user’s question without too much frustration from the end user or require external guidance by IT or Business Intelligence teams to navigate the dashboard. If this is a continued occurrence, users might become annoyed by the tool and stop using it entirely. Dashboards should support users in their day to day jobs and not become a hindrance, as it requires clinical buy-in, if you are moving towards a data-driven health organization.
The Phoenix Children’s Hospital have built a clinical dashboard to help resume a backlog of over 3000 surgical procedures. This was a result of COVID-19, where the governor of Arizona paused elective surgeries to prepare for future patient hospitalization and reduce overcrowding.
Of course this resulted in a unique case, where technology could be used to drive and improve patient outcomes. Instead of having a disorganized system of emails, paper notes and other files. This dashboard housed necessary centralized information where clinical staff could easily navigate and plan their schedule on a day to day basis.
Specifically the creation of this dashboard, allowed surgeons to review cases and assign priority from high, medium or low, to both backlogged and new cases. Dr. Vaidya, chief medical information officer at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, stated about the dashboard: “the technology allowed for synergies across the enterprise in addressing the multifaceted challenges of resuming these operations.” Here we see a prime example of how health analytics can make a significant difference in improving hospital operations and bringing different departments within the organization together.
What are the benefits of clinical dashboards?
This above example does not exist in isolation, research on the positive impact of clinical dashboards on improving patient outcomes is rapidly growing. Another case study was carried out by the Stanford pediatric intensive care unit, which sought to increase compliance with central venous catheter insertion through the implementation of a checklist. The team created a dashboard and found that the dashboard contributed to decreased infection rates.
In Ontario, Markham Stouffville Hospital (MSH), also found a significant reduction in the Emergency Department (ED) patient length-of-stay metrics with the help of dashboards. One caveat is that many papers made it clear that the dashboard was not the sole driving force behind improvements in patient outcomes but was a part of the overall solution to improve patient outcomes; if these dashboards were designed effectively and with the healthcare professional in mind.
This is an important consideration, you can’t just design a dashboard and expect people to use the dashboard automatically. You need buy-in from the clinicians using the dashboard, they need to have a say in the metrics that are used in the designing and planning stages of the dashboard. Also, there needs to be space for people to provide feedback and critique of the dashboard in the planning stages, as this will get people excited about using the dashboard as an integral part of their job. 
What are key questions to ask yourself before building a clinical dashboard?
How will this dashboard drive organizational changes?
Instead of just a hodge podge of key performance indicators placed on your dashboard, which no one is really looking at, these metrics should improve patient outcomes or drive organizational changes. It’s important to take a step back before building a clinical dashboard and analyze issues which would benefit from a) continued monitoring and b) would support the needs of clinicians. For instance, one paper examined the potential role of dashboard use and navigation in reducing medical errors of an electronic health record system.
In this paper, they focused on building a dashboard that was centered on reducing medical errors stemming from patient handoffs between clinicians: “handoffs are a complex procedure requiring the integration of a large body of information about each patient. Imprecisions and errors during handoffs can potentially put the patient’s safety at risk”
In this example, you can see how this event would benefit from the creation of a dashboard because it is a situation which would benefit from continued monitoring and support the needs of clinicians. The study goes on to show the dashboard was used more frequently when nurses received a specific call about a patient’s chart biopsy and they used the dashboard to get quick insights from the electronic health record system. Overall the benefits from this dashboard lie in its ability to continuously monitor metrics, helping to reduce medical errors and support nurses, as a centralized hub of information.
Who owns the dashboard and who will maintain it?
Dashboard maintenance is a key question to consider. There are many questions that stem from dashboard ownership and maintenance:
How often will the data be refreshed? Who will have access to the dashboard? Will it be just the orthopedic department or publicly available within the hospital. Will the dashboard be refreshed daily, weekly or monthly? Is there a proper procedure in place to report data quality issues with the dashboard? (i.e. dates formatted incorrectly? Missing values? ).
Processes could be changing rapidly within healthcare organizations and dashboards metrics might need to be updated or refreshed quarterly or yearly.
In summary, ensuring that the dashboard that is designed has a specific purpose within the organization and is supporting clinicians, is key for the adoption of clinical dashboards as an efficient analytical tool within healthcare organizations
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