Development and Maintenance of Performance Dashboard

Dashboards play a major role in The Ottawa Hospital’s corporate performance strategy and goal of becoming a top 10% performer in quality and safety. Our leadership evaluation, including pay for performance, is based on results reported within our corporate performance dashboards. We have also aligned the strategic goals of our physician group with our corporate goals, and these are reported on our corporate scorecard. In 2013, to support the corporate strategy and build a culture of data driven decision-making, The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) embarked on a road map to develop an enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) program. In that time TOH has built over 20 different dashboards available to all physicians, leaders and healthcare professionals. The dashboards were designed with the ability to filter and drill through a set of standardized dimensions for easy exploration. These dimensions allow users to view performance over time, patient location, patient characteristics, and accountability (both physician and operational). Dashboard examples include a Patient Experience dashboard with results from patient surveys, post-discharge phone-calls and nurse-leader rounding; a Patient Safety dashboard showing prevalence of several patient safety indicators; an Operational dashboard containing over 50 indicators across quality domains; and both a Human Resources and a Finance dashboard for managers. Since 2013, our dashboard utilization has grown from an average of 60 users per month to over 400 users per month, with physicians accounting for 12% of our users and growing. The dashboards have allowed leaders and physicians to work together to monitor and identify areas of improvement for quality and safety, as well as, ideas for cost savings. Utilization of dashboards to support TOH committees and departmental meetings is now commonplace and we have seen improvement in several key indicators including patient experience, hospital-standardized mortality ratio and cost per weighted case.