Dashboards for improving patient care: Review of the literature

Abstract

Aim: This review aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of evidence for the use of clinical and quality dashboards in health care environments. Methods:A literature search was performed for the dates 1996 to 2012 on CINAHL, Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, PsychInfo, Science Direct and ACM Digital Library. A citation search and a hand search of relevant papers were also conducted.Results: One hundred and twenty two full text papers were retrieved of which 11 were included in the review. There was considerable heterogeneity in implementation setting, dashboard users and indicators used. There was evidence that in contexts where dashboards were easily accessible to clinicians (such as in the form of a screen saver) their use was associated with improved care processes and patient outcomes. Conclusion:There is some evidence that implementing clinical and/or quality dashboards that provide immediate access to information for clinicians can improve adherence to quality guidelines and may help improve patient outcomes. However, further high quality detailed research studies need to be conducted to obtain evidence of their efficacy and establish guidelines for their design.4

Introductory Chapter: The Decades Long Quest Continues Toward Better, Safer Healthcare Systems

“…Such computer-based dashboards and report-generating tools can be provider speciic or relect the data for an entire Institution [27][28][29]. Real-time access to quality and outcome data thereby allows to immediate identiication of potential adverse trends, or the hopefully positive response to interventions [30,31]. While no reporting system is perfect and often physicians might criticize that they are being inherently personally linked to adverse events, in a culture of shared accountability, any limitations in the data collection and the reporting process will clearly be acknowledged and used to improve our understanding of overall trends.…”

A Real-Time Autonomous Dashboard for the Emergency Department: 5-Year Case Study (Preprint)

“…[16] A dashboard that fits the changing situation of the ED in real time must have the characteristics of both quality and clinical dashboards. [17] In particular, ensuring real-time availability is challenging and important, because nonreal-time dashboards cannot support decision making. [15] This study aimed to describe the process of developing a real-time organizational dashboard for ED and to evaluate its usability.…”

Modeling and simulating hospital operations in a 3D environment

“…They have been frequently developed for business managers to integrate and summarize data and key performance information in a visual display (Dowding et al 2015). Previous healthcare related dashboards have been developed to analyze bed occupancies (Daley et al 2013), readmission prevention (Stadler et al 2016) and performance management (Mesabbah and Arisha 2016).…”

“…There are typically two types of dashboard utilized in the healthcare sector, clinical and quality (Dowding et al 2015). Clinical dashboards are defined by Dowding et al (2015) as information technology which gives an output of productivity or quality indicators in a visual manner.…”

“…Clinical dashboards are defined by Dowding et al (2015) as information technology which gives an output of productivity or quality indicators in a visual manner. They allow clinicians to access data in a timely manner to inform health decisions which may impact patient care (Dowding et al 2015). Examples of clinical dashboards are seen in McMenamin, Nicholson, and Leech (2011), Koopman et al (2011), andWaitman et al (2011).…”