JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

There is an abundance of patient experience data held within healthcare organisations but stakeholders and staff are often unable to use the output in a meaningful and timely way to improve care delivery. Dashboards, which use visualised data to summarise key patient experience feedback, have the potential to address these issues.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to develop a patient experience dashboard with an emphasis on FFT reporting as per the national policy drive. An iterative process involving co-design involving key stakeholders was used to develop the dashboard, followed by heuristic usability testing.

Methods:

A two staged approach was employed; participatory co-design involving 20 co-designers to develop a dashboard prototype followed by iterative dashboard testing. Language analysis was performed on free-text patient experience data from the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and the themes and sentiment generated was used to populate the dashboard with associated FFT metrics. Heuristic evaluation and usability testing were conducted to refine the dashboard and assess user satisfaction using the system usability score (SUS).

Results:

Qualitative analysis from the co-design process informed development of the dashboard prototype with key dashboard requirements and a significant preference for bubble chart display. Heuristic evaluation revelated the majority of cumulative scores had no usability problem (n=18), cosmetic problem only (n=7), or minor usability problem (n= 5). Mean SUS was 89.7 (SD 7.9) suggesting an excellent rating.

Conclusions:

The growing capacity to collect and process patient experience data suggests that data visualisation will be increasingly important in turning the feedback into improvements to care. Through heuristic usability we demonstrated that very large FFT data can be presented into a thematically driven, simple visual display without loss of the nuances and still allow for exploration of the original free-text comments. This study establishes guidance for optimising the design of patient experience dashboards that healthcare providers find meaningful which in-turn drives patient-centred care.