Red, Green, Yellow . . . Does it work?

Developing a meaningful hospital-wide dashboard is an essential task for a senior leadership team to address. Yet, pursuing a dashboard and implementing a dashboard are not strategies. Rather, these are examples of tactics. The dashboard, itself, should be aligned to the strategic objectives.



Thus, there is an assumption that the 1 year, 3 year, 5 year strategic objectives of a hospital are sound and meet the challenges of the marketplace while maintaining a patient-centered mission. For the purposes of this blog post, allow me to indulge in this assumption.



In the quality improvement industry, we often say with authority "you only improve, what you measure." This may be true. Implicitly, it is understood that items being measured must mean something to someone or some department of business. Yet, we must raise the standard higher and go further.



The science of measurement needs to be understood by healthcare quality professionals. Measurement is important (i.e. rules, rates, ratios, mean vs median, pchart, xchart, trends, normal variation vs outliers, and standard deviations, to name a few.) However, separation between professionals does not come with simply knowing how to measure, but rather knowing what to measure, when to measure, and knowing when to stop measuring.



It is within this measurement space that a healthcare quality professional can bring value to an organization.



Are dashboards an effective tool to guide and instruct performance improvement? If designed and executed properly, I submit that they can be. The equilateral Triangle of Effectiveness consists of the following legs:

• Transparency


• Empowerment


• Accountability

The goal is to achieve sustained effectiveness and efficiency so that patient care delivery is optimized.