Dashboards Merge Health Data

Bill Briggs, Senior Editor
Health Data Management Magazine, April 2005

One thing computers do well is emulating human actions. Because computer functions, though, are so foreign to most users, software developers often give them analogous names like desktop, folder and file.

One of the more recent additions to the lexicon is "dashboard." The analogy comes from the dashboard of a sports car, which features various dials and gauges indicating the status of mechanical components.

Health care software vendors increasingly are incorporating dashboards with similar gauges and monitors into their applications. They display everything from a patient's vital signs to the functional "health" of multiple information systems and network security. And they help unify data from sources that include disparate information systems, medical devices and wireless network sensing devices.

Clinicians can use a dashboard to examine a single view of a patient's condition or aggregate clinical and financial data into an electronic health record.

Senior executives at provider organizations can use the technology to electronically monitor progress toward business goals. And network administrators can employ dashboards to stand guard over electronic wireless networks, continually checking for unauthorized access.

Vendors believe customers are coming to expect such data displays as users become more accustomed to the technology's benefits.

Vendors often make a common distinction about the virtues of dashboard-based technology. It's not just that it brings multiple sources of data together in one place, they say, but that it's easy to use. Most users don't go looking for dashboard technology per se, but those who test it tend to become believers right away, says Frank Sample, president and CEO of VISICU Inc., Baltimore.

"Providers should ask themselves what the goal is," Sample says. "If it's to make access to information as easy and simplistic as they can, then a dashboard can be extremely important."

VISICU markets an intensive care unit patient monitoring system that enables one ICU specialist, or intensivist, to monitor multiple patients from one location. The vendor uses dashboards in two ways. One enables intensivists to monitor ICU patients and the other manages multidisciplinary communications.

For VISICU, the dashboards are part of an application designed for crisis prevention, Sample says. "We want to push data to physicians when the patient starts going in the wrong direction," he explains. "We use evidence-based medicine to leverage one intensivist across a broad number of patients."

The patient monitoring dashboard can display information and send an alert based on trends developed from patient data, including recently administered medications and subtle changes in heart rate. Or, an intensivist can click on a patient's "profile" and on one screen see all relevant data, including admitting information, medications, white blood count and heart rate over time.

The vendor's multidisciplinary communication dashboard enables access to current data for everyone responsible for a patient's care. That includes the attending physician, consulting physician, physical therapist and dietician.

Practice performance

For TASCware Inc., dashboard technology enables access to broad clinical and financial data to help group practice administrators track the business side of health care. "Our technology can monitor how a practice is performing," says Lyle Thompson, CEO of the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company. "We can help a practice monitor things like physician performance, cash flow or equipment utilization."

TASCware sells an application that combines electronic health records and practice management tools. The functions are tied to a single database that funnels all clinical and financial information into the patient record. The dashboard enables group practice administrators to keep an eye on the business.

"We give a view into the practice by setting gauges and flags that monitor productivity, such as how effective you are in billing," Thompson says. A group practice can learn how to improve patient care and profitability through such I.T.-enabled analysis, he adds.

"What physicians really are doing is running a business. But most practices don't do it very well."

Thompson's background includes mainframe computing, where his interest in dashboard technology was bred. TASCware's goal is to make group practice clinical and financial data available in one place and make it simple to use. The system is Web-browser based, so anyone who has used the Internet can easily find their way around, he says.

TASCware also sells billing software to hospitals, but it is group practices that are looking to consolidate vendors and applications to avoid integration costs, Thompson says. As a result, they value centralized practice management monitoring, he adds.

A center stage

Other vendors' products also use dashboard technology to help centrally manage business performance measures. ActiveStrategy Inc., East Norriton, Pa., employs the technology to give top management a tool to establish strategic goals, measures and initiatives, create reports, and track progress toward business targets, says Jack Steele, chairman and CEO.

The ActiveStrategy application mirrors the process of developing and reaching strategic objectives, he explains, and "deploys them vertically and horizontally into an organization, assigning ownership to all levels."

The dashboard helps top management track execution of business strategies through individual objective profiles that use gauges and graphs. The graphic displays show key performance indicators, as determined by each organization, such as length of hospital stay.

"It gives them this year's view of what is needed to achieve the strategic plan," Steele says. "It can include different strategic objective and data `buckets,' such as clinical quality, service quality, employee satisfaction and financials."

The dashboard pulls information from legacy systems as well as data entered manually into the application. To pull from legacy systems requires the vendor's data mapping tool, which addresses systems integration.

Systems integration is one of the technological challenges vendors and their customers face when incorporating dashboard technology, vendor executives note. Sometimes technology challenges are specific to an application.

For Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AirMagnet Inc., the main obstacles often are invisible. AirMagnet makes a wireless network security and operations monitoring system that uses a dashboard to enable system engineers to assess network performance and vulnerability.

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