JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Clinical dashboards are becoming important tools to manage and monitor patients hospitalized in different wards. Moreover, careful attention to the design, usability and user interaction is essential to develop a useful support for clinicians.

Objective:

In this study, the development, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of an interactive dashboard for patient monitoring and management in the Continuity of Care Centre (CCC) was proposed.

Methods:

We developed a dashboard followed the clinicians’ requests based on the daily case managers’ workflow. First, a CCC datamart was created to collect all patients’ information automatically extracted from the hospital’s Data Ware-House (DWH). However, case managers had the possibility to insert other patients evidences in the dashboard using a dedicated form. Moreover, CCC physicians, nurses and administrative staff were surveyed using two validated questionnaires, the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS). Situation Awareness Index (SAI) was proposed to evaluate the user awareness and task efficiency.

Results:

The first version of the CCC dashboard presented four panels with several information, both on the individual patient and the metrics on the totality. The first panel focused on patients’ data, such as demographic factors, admitted, transited, and discharged ward (and their dates), etc. The importance of this panel is the possibility to know information collected from different sources in a single view. The other three panels explained different KPIs for the totality of patients, showed data both in the form of tables, second panel, and by means of graphs, third and fourth panel. After 3 months of daily use, a total of 15 participants, 10 nurses, 2 administrate staff and 3 physicians, were recruited for the dashboard evaluation. The average SUS score of the dashboard was 61.5 points, which indicates “OK-to-Good” usability, and the median score obtained with the QUIS was 5.77, with the highest results in the usability (6.33) and learning (6.01). The overall SAI score was 4 points, with the highest score in “familiarity of dashboard” (4.73 points) and “arousal support” (4.6 points).

Conclusions:

We developed an interactive dashboard for patient monitor and management with good evaluation from users evaluated with different questionnaires.