Before I came to Healthcare Informatics, I worked in a hospital network where, like everybody else, I wore many hats. One of those hats was making a finance performance dashboard. It tracked about 30 indicators. We had no IT system for the dashboard, no software, no reports fed from anywhere. It was me, Excel, PowerPoint, and walking up to the third floor to get the open visit reports on the last day of the month. It was me, gathering reports from… everywhere. Reports on department usage, managed care payments, Medicare, Medicaid. Reports that in most cases were not apples to apples and had to be manipulated so that they were.
And God help me if the secretary in any department was on vacation.
I lost my mind.
But the execs loved the clear and detailed information on the dashboards. It really was useful to them for strategic planning. Yesterday, my replacement at the hospital called me and we started dishing about the dashboard. Which got me thinking about sharing some dashboard best practices in our next issue of Healthcare informatics.
So, are you using dashboards?
A lot of systems bought by hospitals in the recent past have performance dashboard capability. But I suspect many of you did not play with that capability right away (having a hospital to run and all.) Did you get around to using the dashboard function yet?
If you’re using performance dashboards, love them, hate them, are using them in an interesting way, or just want to scream, drop me an email.
I know where you’re coming from.
