Developing Clinical Dashboards

Hospitals, medical centers and other health systems are increasingly using digital dashboard technology to provide relevant, up-to-the-minute information to clinicians in a visually rich format to improve the quality of patient care.

Designing and using clinical dashboards requires substantial physician involvement and a well-defined process. The University of Pennsylvania Health System, a.k.a. Penn Medicine, is currently in the midst of developing the Penn Data Store, a data warehouse and series of individual dashboards, to serve our clinicians and researchers. The Penn story may be of use to you and your organization as you move forward in the world of dashboards.

Our goal was to create a single data storehouse with all patient, administrative, financial and supply chain data mapped to a standard data model and vocabulary. We created a number of objectives in support of this goal in areas such as patient-care quality, safety, compliance, research and finance.

After evaluating a number of choices, we decided to develop our dashboard using the enterprise edition of Oracle Corp.'s Business Intelligence Suite. While not all users' needs will be met with predefined dashboards, a significant portion will. We assembled a wide-ranging team and divided each dashboard project into the following phases:

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