How to build a Dashboard.

Creating an IPU Dashboard

Over the past year we have build an integrated, multidisciplinary Transplant Center from our individual transplant programs. Transplant medicine has been at the pinnacle of value-based health care owing to mandatory outcome reporting on primary (patient and graft survival) and secondary (rejections and organ function) outcomes. However, we want to improve on the current status quo and bring it to the next level. We want to implement registration at the source (in our EMR), perform automatic uploads to mandatory reporting systems, implement tertiary, quaternary and higher outcome reporting by developing PROMs and establishing links with our complication and waitlist registries, and finally link it to our financial data. We want to build an dashboard that visualises all this with information from our hospital information system (readmissions, lenght of stay, etc.). The questions I have are:

1] How to build support from the work floor to implement registration at the source in a convenient way. The burden and time effort of registration should not outweigh the merits of a dashboard.

 

2] How to get budget and IT prioritization (support) from upper management. This is not part of refundable care and there is feeling that transplant medicine is approaching the asymptote of value based health care with increasing cost / effort for increasingly less added value. How to create a sense of urgency and need?

 

3] How to get (an overview) of technical know-how and necessities to build the Dashboard from different databases without the need to involve expensive consultants (to not play into issue #2)?

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Participant comments on How to build a Dashboard.

  1. Hi! This sounds like a great project and a cool initiative, and it seems like it could be the basis for other service lines or centers of excellence to build something similar. With that in mind:
    1. How is registration being completed today? I would assume that it is occuring in a different system? So one way to approach it could be to reduce duplicative work, by putting it in line with the EMR. I also think that putting this information in the EMR could have the potential to enable PROMs down the line, too. And then, if none of those work, I think you could make the case that it is a better experience for the patient to have all of the data in one system, so people should be able to buy in to that.

    2 and 3. I think that these items could go hand in hand. I imagine that someone in a part of your organization has expertise in the different databases, and they would love the opportunity to work on a cool, innovative project. If you could partner with them to assess what needs to be done, then it makes the case easier to bring for budget and prioritization from upper management.

    Finally, I would recommend that you tie this dashboard to a strategic goal, whether it’s transparency, quality, financial, or the overall excellence of the program. And then, much of the work can be done using a design thinking approach, and evaluating “why” we want to measure something and what it will help us improve or monitor. Once you can get those items down to 2-3 goals and how it ties to your strategic initiatives, I think getting IT budget and buy-in will be easy to obtain.

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