Interactive Healthcare Dashboards

Limitations of Inefficient Reporting Systems

Reporting systems are very crucial for the healthcare industry as analyst’s reports are at the heart of how health systems are run. Doctors, nurses, clinicians, pharmacists and even administrative staff depend on these reports to understand how the areas and the patients they’re responsible for are doing. Data analysts receive many report requests each day from healthcare executives to department managers to clinicians. The process of handling and channeling these reports tie up many highly trained analysts with the manual work of gathering and compiling data using tools like Access and Excel. Such tools are only capable of producing a static report, which has limited use as an improvement tool. Static reports are deficient because they lack the interactivity and visual display capabilities needed to help health practitioners make sense of the number presented. They also lack the context users need to understand how and where to implement change and to drive better performance and practice evidence-based medicine.

Clinicians are trained using data and taught to critically evaluate patient therapies based upon data in the literature. They want to do the right thing for their patients, yet these static reports don’t provide the necessary insights clinicians need. Static reports also hinder clinicians from comparing their outcomes to their peers or national standards. For example, a physician may believe that his or her length of stay (LOS) or staff-to-patient ratio metrics reflect quality care. However, without access to other LOS outcomes and staff-to-patient ratio metrics, physicians can’t compare metrics and discover areas for improvement.

Advantages of Interactive Dashboards

Healthcare dashboards are critical for health practitioners, doctors, clinicians, improvement teams and even CEOs. The are critical for anyone who needs quick, insightful and accurate answers to their questions in an easy-to-understand visual format. It’s much easier for workers to glance at a bar chart to see if metrics are still in the desired range, rather than trying to digest a monthly line item report of patient data. Plus users don’t need to know querying or coding languages such as SQL in order to dig into data or find valuable insights. Healthcare dashboards provide a near real-time data dashboards display, workers can visualize where they are, where they are going, and how fast they are headed there. This enables quicker course correction if needed.

Dashboards also show users if they are holding their improvement gains for previous initiatives or if they are slipping as a previously targeted project falls off the radar. Dashboards serve as an early-detection tool for caregivers to provide preemptive interventions.They also give daily reinforcement to workers that their work is making a difference. This boosts confidence in their ability to make improvement changes. It also boosts job satisfaction because workers are able to maintain those gains and see the results of their efforts in the dashboard.

A healthcare dashboard also serves as a much-needed single source of truth across an organization. Everyone—from executives to frontline clinicians—can look at the same data. When everyone in the organization has access to a consistent, reliable source of truth, then everyone can speak the same language, spread a system-wide standard of care, and work together to implement improvement initiatives. For example, because a dashboard offers a single source of truth, the dashboard can be used to maintain the definition of each specific goal. Having objectives defined in a consistent way across the system helps everyone remain focused on the right target.

A good Healthcare Dashboard should be easily accessible, display reliable data, contain relevant data, use and provide timely data, and include trends and benchmarks.