Quality Dashboard Assignment Paper

Dashboards

Suppose you needed to make sense of data. You were faced with either multiple sheets of numbers and text or one page of collated graphs and charts representing the data. Which would you choose? If you are a visual learner, you may prefer the latter.

Because they are visually appealing and contained, dashboards can provide a quick snapshot of key quality measures. Recalling our previous example of patient falls, with a dashboard a nurse executive would be able to organize the falls by patient condition and time of day. The visual display would help the nurse executive trace any trends and consider relationships between the identified factors, thus advancing her organization’s commitment to safety and the Triple Aim/Quadruple Aim.

Now that you have selected, justified, and refined your quality measures from last week, this week you can consider how to display them in a dashboard. This week, you will do so as part of your Module 2 Assignment.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

· Evaluate priority areas for healthcare quality measurement

· Analyze the influence of the Triple Aim/Quadruple Aim for prioritization of measures

· Create a quality dashboard

· Justify choice of visual display

· Recommend strategies for communicating dashboard data in healthcare organizations

 

 

References:

Parkland Health and Hospital System. (2019). Quality of care dashboard—Summary indicators. Retrieved from https://www.parklandhospital.com/summary-indicators

 

Lowder, D. (2016, October 20). Healthcare dashboards vs. scorecards: Use both to improve outcomes. Retrieved from https://www.healthcatalyst.com/healthcare-dashboards-vs-scorecards-to-improve-outcomes

 

Denham, C. R. (2006). Leaders need dashboards, dashboards need leaders. Journal of Patient Safety, 2(1), 45–53.

 

Kroch, E., Vaughn, T., Koepke, M., Roman, S., Foster, D., Sinha, S., & Levey, S. (2006). Hospital boards and quality dashboards. Journal of Patient Safety, 2(1), 10–19.

 

Parr, J. M., Bell, J., & Koziol-McLain, J. (2018). Evaluating fundamentals of care: The development of a unit‐level quality measurement and improvement programme. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 27(11–12), 2360–2372.

 

Weggelaar-Jansen, A. M. J. W. M., Broekharst, D. S. E., & de Bruijne, M. (2018). Developing a hospital-wide quality and safety dashboard: A qualitative research study. BMJ Quality & Safety, 27(12), 1000–1007. Retrieved from https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/27/12/1000

 

Assignment: Quality Dashboard

When you think of a story, what does it include? A beginning, a middle, and an end. A conflict or problem, and a resolution. Dashboards are not only helpful for monitoring the current quality and safety climate but also for evaluating where problems have arisen. In other words, the best dashboards tell a story through visual representations of data. The nurse executive serves as a main character in that story, determining what actions to take to resolve quality issues based on the information coming in. Quality Dashboard Assignment Paper

For this Assignment, you will create a quality dashboard for Community General Hospital, justify your presentation of the measures, and leverage the dashboard as a leadership tool. What is the story you want to tell? And how do you want to tell it?

To Prepare:

· Review the Community General Hospital Case Study presented in the Learning Resources.

· Explore this week’s Resources about the use of dashboards for leadership and quality improvement.

· Review any feedback received in the Week 7 Discussion about your chosen measures for Community General Hospital.

· Determine how you will display the measures in your dashboard.

Assignment

 

Part 1: Dashboard Using Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, create a quality dashboard based on the Community General Hospital Case Study. Your dashboard must include 6–8 measures. Use mock data to represent the measures you have chosen.

 

Part 2: Written Summary To accompany your dashboard, write a 2- to 3-page paper in which you do the following:

· Identify the 6–8 quality measures you have chosen for your dashboard.

· Explain why these measures are important to the organization.

· Analyze how the Triple Aim/Quadruple Aim is represented in your chosen measures.

· Explain how you displayed the measures. Justify your choice of display.

· Provide a strategy for communicating the dashboard throughout the organization.

· Explain how the dashboard could be used as a leadership tool to improve patient outcomes.

Community General Hospital Case Study

Creating a Quality and Safety Dashboard

It’s your first week on the job—your dream job, actually. You are thrilled to be working as the Assistant Director of Clinical Quality Improvement at Community General Hospital (CGH). For your first project, Dr. Schenk, your boss and mentor, asks you to create a quality and safety dashboard for her monthly report to the Board. You are eager to show off the skills you’ve gained from your master’s program. If this goes well, you might be the one presenting to the Board in a few months.

Dr. Schenk gives you tips on where to start. She shows you some previous dashboards and says that they were not particularly helpful to the Board members, who really want information that allows comparisons to other hospitals.

You wonder aloud whether there are national standards that would be useful, because you have read in the literature that active hospital board reviews of quality and safety using dashboards are associated with better performance (Denham, 2006; Kroch et al., 2006; Jha & Epstein, 2010).

Dr. Schenk agrees, “Yes, you should search the relevant sites for current information. Look at the Joint Commission, CMS Hospital Compare, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.” She continues, “Of course, we should have measures that are relevant to our quality and safety issues here at CGH. We need to highlight our current QI projects to show that we are making improvements, but we also want to identify some of the gaps where we could do better. Right now, we are working on reducing surgical site infections, reducing readmissions, and reducing wait times in the Emergency Department.”

Dr. Schenk outlines a few additional instructions:

· Try to kill two birds with one stone—start with measures that the hospital is required to report.

· Present clear metrics that reflect the current status of the hospital.

· Don’t get too bogged down in detail because it will only overwhelm the Board.

Dr. Schenk then leaves you to your research. You look at the websites she has recommended for current reporting requirements and measures.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (n.d.). Hospital Compare. Retrieved December 5, 2019, from https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html

Joint Commission. (2019). Performance measurement. Retrieved from https://www.jointcommission.org/performance_measurement.aspx

Institute for Healthcare Improvement. (n.d.). Measures. Retrieved from http://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/Measures/default.aspx

The websites include so many measures, too many for one dashboard. Clearly you will need to focus the CGH Quality and Safety Dashboard on a subset or aggregation of the many possible measures that you could include.

Next, you remember Dr. Schenk’s advice to keep it relevant. You think about what you know about the hospital. Not everything that you found in your research would be relevant. On the other hand, you didn’t find measures for some things that are relevant for CGH. This hospital is such a vital part of the community. How do you capture that on a dashboard? People love working here. The turnover rate for nurses is low. Physicians move here to practice medicine because this is such a great hospital, in a family-oriented community. And the best part, in your opinion, is that physicians and staff are truly engaged in making things better—probably because everyone from the cleaning staff to the CEO are required to take the CGH Performance Improvement course. It’s hard to put numbers on those indicators. Quality Dashboard Assignment Paper

Some other facts are easier to put numbers on. CGH is a nonprofit, 200-bed, non-teaching hospital. In 2019, CGH recorded the following data:

Number of admissions: 11,986

Number of patients over the age of 65: 2,637

Percent of patients over the age of 65: 22%

Percent of patients who identify as a race other than White: 38%

Percent of patients who are female: 59%

Mean length of stay for all patients (days): 3

Percent of patients readmitted within 30 days: 1.4

After completing your research, you now have enough details to select measures and draft the CGH Quality and Safety Dashboard.

References

Denham, C. R. (2006). Leaders need dashboards, dashboards need leaders. Journal of Patient Safety, 2(1), 45–53.

Jha, A., & Epstein, A. (2010). Hospital governance and the quality of care. Health Affairs, 29(1), 182–187. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2009.0297

Kroch, E., Vaughn, T., Koepke, M., Roman, S., Foster, D., Sinha, S., & Levey, S. (2006). Hospital boards and quality dashboards. Journal of Patient Safety, 2(1), 10–19.