Digital leadership in action in a hospital through a real time dashboard system implementation and experience

Abstract

Background: Regulatory and competitive pressures and the need for cross-organizational data sharing are demanding that hospital leaders create a data-driven decision making culture to improve performance. Using an innovation assimilation strategy framework, this paper describes how a hospital used its implementation of a Real Time Dashboard System (rtDashboard) to improve performance, change its organizational culture and put it on a path towards digital leadership (DL). Objective: Implement an rtDashboard system that can support a data-driven decision making culture for performance improvement while engaging business and information technology (IT) leaders in DL practice. Results: The rtDashboard contributed significantly to monitoring hospital performance and influenced change in unit level decision making that was aligned with hospital goals. The rtDashboard implementation not only provided substantial performance improvement and quality benchmarking, but also changed the responsibility and accountability culture and helped the hospital put in practice DL principles to support future innovations. Conclusions: DL through rtDashboard is a demonstration of how a hospital can seek and strive for excellence. As much as dashboards are pivotal to organizational performance monitoring at the senior leadership level, the process used to diffuse it to every operational unit in support of a data-driven decision making culture showcases how hospital executives and IT leaders can work together to continually align and re-align their strategies to reach organizational goals -the core of DL practice.

Digital Leadership Skills and Associations with Psychological Well-Being

“…However, our sample is comparable to other studies in this sector [16]. To date, research on digital leadership has been mainly in the management field: e.g., what characteristics are important for digital leaders and how these relate to the success of transformation/change processes or performance [1,49,50]. Studies from this research field have shown that companies with high leadership capabilities are more successful than companies which do not invest in digital leadership [1,10,11].…”

Engagement leading to empowerment—digital innovation strategies for patient care continuity

“…Some have focused on leveraging advanced technologies to track patient flows in ED to reduce delays and improve patient and nurse/physician communication (Burke et al 2004), to optimally allocate operating rooms for surgeries using data analytics (Raghupathi and Raghupathi 2014), and to reduce patient falls, hospital acquired infections, etc. in patient rooms (Weiner, et al, 2016). Besides digital transformations, several process innovations were used to improve patient engagement (Fowler et el 2018).…”

Investigating the Use of Real-Time Data in Nudging Patients" Emergency Department (ED) Attendance Behaviour

“…Real-time applications in healthcare have been used in health monitoring systems using physiological sensors on patients to enhance quality of life and reduce healthcare costs (Simpao et al 2014;Wan et al 2013); clinical decision-support (Mane 2012), and dashboards for operational performance monitoring and compliance (Simpao et al 2014;Weiner et al 2016). It is increasingly necessary for healthcare organizations to improve performance by creating a data-driven decision-making culture.…”

“…It is increasingly necessary for healthcare organizations to improve performance by creating a data-driven decision-making culture. Weiner et al (2016) reported on the development of a real-time operational dashboard supporting data integration from multiple systems that was made available to all hospital staff with permissions, to create a culture of transparency and accountability. This required clinical and IT collaboration, and aligned organizational and unit level performance, supporting agility.…”