Rapid development of visualization dashboards to enhance situation awareness of COVID-19 telehealth initiatives at a multihospital healthcare system

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid expansion of telehealth services as healthcare organizations aim to mitigate community transmission while providing safe patient care. As technology adoption rapidly increases, operational telehealth teams must maintain awareness of critical information such as patient volumes and wait times, patient and provider experience, and telehealth platform performance. Using a model of situation awareness as a conceptual foundation and a user-centered design approach we describe our process for rapidly developing and disseminating dashboard visualizations to support telehealth operations. We used a five-step process to gain domain knowledge, identify user-needs, identify data sources, design and develop visualizations, and iteratively refine these visualizations. Through this process we identified three distinct stakeholder groups and designed and developed visualization dashboards to meet their needs. Feedback from users demonstrated the dashboards support situation awareness and informed important operational decisions. Lessons learned are shared to provide other organizations with insights from our process.</jats:p>

A Conceptual Model for Geo-Online Exploratory Data Visualization: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…We also found a restricted number of platforms that are based on the "clinical data type" [60], including, for example, tools to monitor healthcare system capacity [61,62], to forecast different potential outcomes of the COVID-19 epidemic based on several parameters [63] (see Figure 4, right), or to assess the risk level of attending events [64].…”

The Clinical Information Systems Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…They then mapped trials based on location, patient, and intervention characteristics to create a visual dashboard of global COVID-19 research efforts. Dixit et al in JAMIA published the development of eVisit Operations Dashboards for executives, telehealth operational leaders, and management teams at a large health system in the USA [ 173 ]. They share several lessons regarding rapid implementation of visual reporting displays: use a lightweight and iterative user-centered approach; basic (accurate) information is better than no visualization; clearly indicate development status and timeliness; develop prioritization criteria for visualization and feature development; stabilize the data environment as much as possible; and metric design, user literacy, and user control should be based on audience.…”

Managing Pandemic Responses with Health Informatics – Challenges for Assessing Digital Health Technologies

“…For example, coronavirus dashboards give signals when (a region in) a country exceeds thresholds such as number of positive test results or number of ICU or hospital admissions, indicating that more stringent social measures such as lockdowns must be applied [ 23 ]. Another example comes from US health systems that have leveraged their electronic health records infrastructure to support rapid screening processes, laboratory testing, clinical decision support, reporting tools and patient-facing technology to manage COVID-19 [ 24 – 27 ]. Evaluation in this context needs to be approached from a complex systems paradigm by necessity as the technology is often discreet and built to rapidly evolving requirements involving multiple stakeholders.…”