As the use of data-driven Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) increases, healthcare organizations are adopting Executive Dashboards to track organizational performance. While dashboards deliver insight and identify areas for improvement, they fail to make the data actionable and the value is often offset by the unproductive fire drills and churn they create. There are three keys to create and deploy insightful and effective dashboards successfully: 1. Aggregation of underlying dashboards to create the executive dashboard 2. Establishment of clear ownership and accountability 3. Sustainable process

1. Healthcare Dashboards:
3 Keys for Creating Effective and
Insightful Executive Dashboards
— Russ Stahelli

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The Reality of Executive Dashboards
Executive Dashboards have
become prevalent in today’s
healthcare landscape.
Dashboards deliver insight and
identify areas for improvement.
The truth is the value of
executive dashboards is often
offset by the unproductive fire
drills and churn they create.

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Keys to Executive Dashboard Success
1. Aggregation of underlying
dashboards to create the
executive dashboard
2. Establishment of clear
ownership and accountability
3. Sustainable process

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1. Aggregate Underlying Dashboards
The first key is the most
important in creating an
effective executive dashboard.
To drive performance improve-
ment an executive dashboard
must be an aggregation of
underlying dashboards.
This bottom-up approach
delivers an aggregated
summary of key metrics from
the organization.

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1. Aggregate Underlying Dashboards
The Chief Medical Officer sees
that length of stay (LOS) has
increased for new mothers in
Women and Children’s.
Seeking more clarification on the
outlier she sends an e-mail to the
Director of Women and
Children’s.
The director forwards the
message to her team requesting
additional detail and explanation.
Consider this scenario

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1. Aggregate Underlying Dashboards
Following several hours of work,
and multiple emails, the team
locates the report the CMO is
referring to.
They determine how it was
created, and produce their own
report to refute or explain the data.
Lacking proper analytical tools
the result is a response that may
or may not represent reality.
Consider this scenario

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1. Aggregate Underlying Dashboards
To avoid similar fire drills
executive dashboards must
be built from underlying
departmental dashboards.
An effective executive
dashboard methodology is
one where the departments
with accountability for the
metric, vet, approve, and
produce the metrics merged
into the executive version.

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2. Establish Ownership & Accountability
The second key to establishing
successful executive dash-
boards is to establish clear
ownership and accountability for
each tracked measure.
In the example shared above,
the CMO knew who to reach
out to in order to understand the
LOS data.
In healthcare organizations,
however, performance account-
ability is rarely so well defined.

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2. Establish Ownership & Accountability
This question of ownership goes
hand in hand with using
underlying dashboards to feed
the executive dashboard.
Each underlying dashboard has
a designated owner. Account-
ability is well defined.
Each dashboard owner pro-
actively monitors the data to
ensure improved performance
on the measure is achieved.

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3. Make the Process Sustainable
The third key to a successful
executive dashboard is to make
the process sustainable.
Executive dashboards tend to
get more complex over time.
Executives become accustomed
to seeing a series of measures
on a regular basis, and they
rarely drop measures from their
dashboards.
On the contrary, they add them.

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3. Make the Process Sustainable
To ensure sustainability the
owners of the underlying
dashboards are accountable for
populating the executive
dashboards.
This decentralized model ensures
the dashboard owner, who
understands the data best, is
responsible for integrating data
into the executive dashboard.

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3. Make the Process Sustainable
An effective framework
specifies a standard data
format to which every
underlying application or
dashboard must conform.
The framework consists of a
handful of items that every
measure must present—
such as unit, month, and
clinical area—so the data is
represented in a uniform way.

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Executive Dashboard Example
An example of an executive dashboard created from an aggregation of underlying
dashboards showing actionable data and clear measurements.

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Executive Dashboards Done Right
Organizations that
implement the three keys
outlined in this commentary
will have effective and
insightful executive
dashboards.
Leadership will gain deeper
insight in to overall organiza-
tional performance and
better empower those
accountable to continually
drive improvement.

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Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
Healthcare Dashboards:
3 Keys for Creating Effective and Insightful Executive Dashboards

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For more information:

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Russ Staheli joined Catalyst as a data architect in October 2011. He started his
career as an Intern and later Outcomes Analyst at Intermountain Healthcare in the
Institute for Health Care Delivery Research supporting the Advanced Training
Program for Executives & QI Leaders (ATP) and the Primary Care Clinical
Program. Before coming to Catalyst he worked as a Management Engineer
Programmer Analyst for the Duke University Health System in their Performance
Services department supporting their Infection Control and Epidemiology efforts.
While there, he also worked as an external consultant to advance the analytical work of the Duke
Infection Control Outreach Network (DICON), a collaborative of over 30 community hospitals. Russ
holds an Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Administration from University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill and a Bachelor’s degree in Health Services Research from the University of Utah.