Continuous Improvement in the Management of Hospital Wards: The Use of Operational Dashboards (2013)

The success of any organization depends on its ability to maintain profits while the landscape of its operations changes. Organizations must be able to use available resources to identify changes in their daily operations and have the ability to address them in a timely manner. Operational dashboards provide a tool for managers to easily monitor employee performance and to coach their staff in order to achieve improvements. These stoplight type metric displays provide visual representations in near real-time. Consequently, the use of dashboards is particularly crucial to healthcare because it prompts management to respond to the changing needs of HCO departments, which ultimately affect its quality of care and impact its overall performance measurements. To meet these challenges, it is recommended that the administration of a large acute care HCO develop a dashboard in order for it to monitor the results and evaluate the progress of its busy Nursing Department which is responsible for handling Inpatient and Outpatient service care.The success of any organization depends on its ability to maintain profits while the landscape of its operations changes. Organizations must be able to use available resources to identify changes in their daily operations and have the ability to address them in a timely manner. Operational dashboards provide a tool for managers to easily monitor employee performance and to coach their staff in order to achieve improvements. These stoplight type metric displays provide visual representations in near real-time. Consequently, the use of dashboards is particularly crucial to healthcare because it prompts management to respond to the changing needs of HCO departments, which ultimately affect its quality of care and impact its overall performance measurements. To meet these challenges, it is recommended that the administration of a large acute care HCO develop a dashboard in order for it to monitor the results and evaluate the progress of its busy Nursing Department which is responsible for handling Inpatient and Outpatient service care. Identified in Table 1 are examples of metrics that could be used to develop such a tool. Also included in this table is the dimensional significance that this information bears. By comparing results on a weekly or monthly basis, administrators would be able to evaluate quality and to identify possible areas of improvement within this critical department, which functions as the backbone of the healthcare organization. This undoubtedly will lead to higher quality care, more efficient processes, lower costs, and higher patient and staff satisfaction.Efficiency metrics provide insightful information which contributes to the ability of meeting DRG requirements. The impact to the HCO is multifold for this purpose. Efficiency means that more patients can utilize the services provided, which leads to better overall community care, higher profits from DRG, and more income revenue from turn-over of patients (Table 2).As stated earlier, cost is also a key indicator. Therefore, since the licensing and skill levels of nurses impact both quality and costs of care, it is recommended to also measure these metrics in the nursing dashboard. (Table 3)Satisfaction is another measurement of a successful HCO. Moreover, nursing satisfaction can be used to predict the unit's employee retention. To this end, keeping the best nursing staff on hand ensures that the quality of care standards would be met. In addition, overall efficiency and cost control would exist because the nursing staff would use training to enhance their service offering rather than learning basic protocols.HCO quality metrics are an important indicator of the overall hospital performance. Because facility reimbursement is based on pay for performance (P4P), quality standards must be maintained. …