Measuring Success
Grading the success of a dashboard can be tricky. In many cases, the operational leaders may grade the success of a dashboard by their inability to ask questions that can’t be answered with the data. However, we encourage you to avoid the trap of equating these two things.
Key Insight: “I can think of more things to measure” ≠ “our dashboards aren’t successful .”
Instead, we encourage you to ask the initiative leaders within your committee to evaluate your success on the following dimensions:
- Are there things we initially identified as part of our goals yet we’re unable to tell if we moved in the right or wrong direction?
- Is the data quality sufficient for me to discuss next steps with members of my team?
- If no, then who in my department can work with the analyst to close data integrity gaps?
If you communicate this framework for measuring the success of your dashboard early in the discussions with your committee, you’ll be setting the right expectation with that group. There will always be more questions, but the work doesn’t have to wait to begin.
Patient Considerations
One consideration with measuring all these things and successfully getting buy-in across your whole medical community is that some people may feel a loss of autonomy and potentially that they are being unnecessarily surveilled. In some cases, prescribers in the health systems that we interviewed even went so far as to tell the patients that they couldn’t prescribe pain medications because “they are watching everything we do.”
These cases are the exception rather than the rule, however. Most prescribers welcomed having a standard prescribing protocol that their peers agreed with that they could refer to. But to get out in front of any unproductive dialog with patients, many of the health systems we interviewed coupled this work with strong patient and community outreach and messaging. This will be addressed in a subsequent chapter of this playbook.