Problem: IT at Work

Dashboards in Action at Hartford Hospital

Health care providers at Hartford Hospital, a 700-bed teaching hospital in Connecticut, were challenged by the shortage of realtime data in useable form, according to Michael Lindbergh M.D., chairman of the department of medicine (Baldwin, 2011). In 2010, Hartford Hospital implemented dashboard technology from CareFx (CareFx.com). Dr. Lindberg uses the dashboard to track data in three key areas that impact the hospital's performance:

1. Patient data. Data on patients' length-of-stay and percentage of early morning discharges.

2. Bed availability. Data on types of beds open, and percentage of beds not available for patients such as those being cleaned, or beds in a room with a patient in isolation.

3. Remission rate. Data about patients who return to the hospital within 30 days of their discharge date. Dashboards in Action at Hartford Hospital The dashboard data helps Dr. Lindberg fulfill Joint Commission requirements for ongoing physician evaluations. He can identify trends and compare current to past performance. According to Dr. Lindberg, "We need to have a handle on what physicians are doing. Having a database to drill down to the individual physician goes a long way toward satisfying those requirements." Purely financial data is not yet available on the CareFx dashboard, but Lindberg plans to add indicators such as cost per hospitalization broken down by physician and department to identify doctors who are outliers for test ordering.

Questions: 1. What KPIs are displayed on Dr. Lindberg's dashboard?

2. What KPIs will be added to the dashboard?