JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A clinical dashboard is a data-driven clinical decision support tool visualizing multiple key performance indicators in a single report while minimizing time and effort for data gathering. Studies have shown that including patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in clinical dashboards supports the clinician’s understanding of how treatments impact patients’ health status and helps identifying health-related quality of life changes at an early stage.

Objective:

While in existing literature various approaches exist on what components to include in clinical dashboards, no unified list of relevant design principles is present. To address this gap, we aimed to determine design principles for clinical dashboards incorporating PROMs.

Methods:

We used a two-step approach. First, we conducted a scoping literature review to summarize existing evidence of relevant design principles for clinical dashboards in general. Second, insights from interviews with ten software producers and six users of clinical dashboards validated the design principles found in the scoping literature review, and additional design principles were identified. We first applied a deductive approach followed by inductive coding for the interview analysis.

Results:

We found 16 design principles in our scoping literature review. When discussing them with interview partners, nine additional design principles emerged. Both software producers and users agreed on the primary purpose of a clinical dashboard incorporating PROs to enhance patient communication in outpatient settings. Dashboard benefits include enhanced data visualization and improve workflow efficiency, while interoperability and data collection were named as adoption challenges. Consistency in dashboard design principles is preferred across different episodes of care, with adaptations only for disease-specific PROMs. The design principles can be accumulated as follows: generic, PROM-related, and PROM-independent principles and user adoption principles.

Conclusions:

Clinical dashboards have the potential to facilitate informed treatment decisions if certain design principles are followed. This study establishes a comprehensive framework of design principles for clinical dashboards incorporating PROs, derived from a scoping literature review and stakeholder interviews. The resulting framework encompasses 25 design principles distributed among four main concepts, which guide the development of effective clinical dashboards in healthcare practice. Clinical Trial: n/a