Introduction
To improve quality of care and accountability, various organisations have automated paper-based forms into electronic formats such as visual data presentations (dashboards). While the level of evidence that dashboards directly impact patient safety is limited, the act of showing data via a dashboard may motivate quality and safety efforts. Furthermore, the capture and utilisation of real-time data can improve outcomes by empowering users to track their own performance, motivating staff by peer comparisons or distance-from-targets.
The process for disseminating patient safety data at the health network involved extracting data from the electronic incident reporting system (IRS), compiling a weekly report, and sending the report to the executive leadership (EL) via email. This meant that the data presented lagged by approximately seven days which hampered responsiveness.
The aim of the project was to develop a dashboard that allows for daily viewing of live patient safety data by the EL to ensure earlier detection of improvement areas and leadership oversight, using the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle.
Body
During the planning phase, several meetings took place between stakeholders and an information analyst (IA). Consensus validation of the Key Performance Indicators occurred after consultation with the Director Safety and Quality and Executive Director Clinical Governance. Approval to extract data from the IRS was sought and granted. In the ‘Do’ phase, the first version of the dashboard using PowerBI was created by the IA. Iterative improvements were made after input from the team in the ‘Study’ phase. The dashboard was published in January 2025 and a feedback module was added to allow for continued improvements.
Conclusion
The benefits realised include automatic updates which reduces data entry timelines, reduced data access delay, comparisons with previous performance, a secure and resilient platform that is shared across the network, and the potential for scalability.