Hospitals are complex organizations which have huge data generated from several sources. All these can range form simple to critical but having a crucial impact on the performance of hospitals. There is always a need of collection, storage, segregation of the segment specific data in several levels and analyze them. The process does not complete here, for effective management practices we need to put the analysis in to a format which is easy to decipher and quicker to represent for management decision.
Dashboard is the tool which serves the purpose. Dashboards can be as simple as an editable white screen with prominent numbers with specific/particular headings or could be as complex as a multi bar diagram to a line graph , part whole relationship or a pie chart. The charts and graphs provide visual inputs for quicker grasping and interpretation. How is it important ?
There are many areas in the hospital operational front which need to be constantly monitored and the indicators of the performance of those areas are called key performance indicators (KPI), A key performance indicator may be related to a clinical or operational performance. Lets take an example, if your hospital has set a performance area and want to put it under surveillance e.g. the indicator of average length of stay (ALOS) then a dash board can be an excellent to continually monitor the same. Its needless to mention that ALOS monitoring is an important aspect of hospital administration because it gives an indication of operational excellence. A normal average set and a deviation from that, for that indicator would certainly help the management to take quicker analysis and quicker action saving many man hours and resources in all possible ways.