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Present only pertinent data on dashboards for senior leaders, board members

Quality Improvement Monitor, July 27, 2007

Quality improvement (QI) directors who want to build effective dashboards should present a few pertinent indicators that help the board of directors answer the question "Do we stay the course or change direction?"

"People get into trouble with dashboards when they try to put 500 boxes on them, each of which turns a different color," says Ken Rohde, a consultant with The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc., in Marblehead, MA. "You're overloading yourself with all this information, and then it doesn't serve the fundamental purpose of helping you get the minimum mission-critical pieces of information."

The next thing QI directors need to do is select what information they will present to the board and other senior leaders. For example, if the five pillars of the hospital's mission are patient safety, patient satisfaction, service quality, economic success, and community support, then the dashboard should indicate how well the hospital is doing in these areas.

"That doesn't mean we're going to have one single measure of patient safety or patient satisfaction," Rohde says. "The real secret is in the ability to roll up and roll down your indicators."

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