Trashing the Health Dashboards | MedPage Today
[post_content]
Disclaimer: This article has been automatically aggregated from
Every day, in every interaction we have with our patients, our practice, our learners, our institution, there are more and more dashboards that we need to pay attention to, respond to, act on.
In our electronic medical record, there is page after page of dashboards that we can pull up for our individual patients and our practice patterns, potentially useful data that is often hidden away.
Administrative data is available on patient access, provider capacity, time to third-next-available appointments, no-show rates, billing details. Quality improvement data is out there as well, and fed to us on a regular basis; we are presented with reams of things we need to do better, things we need to get our patients to do, things that people are scoring us on.
And often these things come to us at a time when it’s not really practical, not something we can act on in the moment; more often than not, it’s just an “FYI.”
You have X percentage of patients whose diabetes measures are above goal, whose blood pressure is not in optimal range, who have not done all their vaccines in a timely manner, who should be screened for lung cancer or breast cancer or colon cancer or prostate cancer but have not been.
When these things come to us at a time we can’t act on them, when we’re not face-to-face with a patient, it’s often hard to think about how we can use this information to make the lives of our patients better. And making our patients better is what we’re interested in more than anything else.
Most practices, from small private practices through massive groups at major academic medical centers, have dashboards that collect data and report on them, sometimes for the benefits of providers, sometimes for patients, and sometimes for the institution.
When the institution meets certain quality standards, they get reimbursed more.
When providers keep up with the action items they are responsible for, they can get a little something extra.
When patients get these items taken care of, are compliant with taking their medicines, show up for their appointments, complete their healthcare maintenance, they usually get better and stay healthier.
Everybody has a vested interest in making sure all this stuff gets paid attention to, but more often than not, we don’t have the resources to keep on top of it all.
When a provider gets their e-competency report they can see how often they close their notes in a timely manner, respond promptly to portal messages, review lab results and communicate them to patients. But most providers tell me that when they see these they just feel more stressed, feel that someone is watching them, slapping them on the wrist, and they wish that they could do better.
Most everyone would if they could.
So perhaps it’s time to think about rethinking these dashboards, turning them into something living and breathing, something that we can use to sense patterns, close gaps, find solutions.
Sometimes this means reaching out to an individual patient, or an individual provider, or a practice as a whole, to help everybody find a better way to get done what needs doing.
Sometimes this might mean completely changing directions, rethinking how we do things, innovating to pour resources at the right problem at the right time, for every patient.
Sometimes it might just be the right nudge to get the patient to take their medicines, to get their vaccines done, to complete their overdue mammogram or colonoscopy.
And not just the nudge; it’s the follow through to make sure that the medications end up in their stomach, the vaccines in their arms, and that mammogram and colonoscopy get performed, and the right follow up happens.
And sometimes it might be discovering the problem at the core of healthcare: that our patients cannot afford their medicines, cannot afford healthy food, cannot find a safe place to exercise, are missing gaps in their knowledge and health literacy that are preventing them from knowing what to do to improve their health.
We, as individual providers, wish we had the time to look at everything, both at the individual patient level and at the system level, to fix everything that’s wrong.
I’m sure the institution wishes it could give us everything we need to plug the holes, to play catch up, to make sure nothing gets missed, that everybody does everything right.
So maybe it’s time we rebuild these dashboards into something other than just a reporting mechanism, into something that actually helps get something, everything, done.
This may be turning things on their heads, it may make a lot of people (especially the vendors who built these dashboards) very unhappy, but perhaps that’s the price we pay to move to a more successful place for our patients and ourselves.
I would love to see new living and breathing dashboards that give us just the right nudges, just the right reminders, at the right place and at the right time for every patient.
I know that’s asking a lot, that’s a lot of heavy lifting.
But if we rethink this now and build something better, we’d all be better off, not drowning under a sea of dashboards that don’t really help us all that much.
for informational purposes only. We do not claim ownership, accuracy, or liability for the content provided. All rights belong to the original publisher.