Home Forums From Data to Dashboards Winter 2021 Discussion 1 (DTDW21) Reply To: Discussion 1 (DTDW21)

#8229
Cielo Ramirez
Participant

This dashboard does fulfill Few’s one-sentence definition of a dashboard, but there is certainly room for improvement. It displays information needed to improve patient outcomes by indicating harmful trends. These can be addressed with further investigation and solutions can be implemented. All of the data for key indicators is consolidated on a single screen. While it reads like a report, stop-light color-coding does lead the reader to a conclusion about which indicators are problematic and require further attention.

As Few notes in his “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe” article, color is not an effective means for visually encoding quantitative values. Splitting the time scale into months is a meaningful improvement from quarters, but it is difficult to interpret much regarding trends over time. This dashboard does not readily show the degree of deviation from acceptable bounds. It fails to readily show how individual data points are related to one another, unless a threshold is crossed. It does not facilitate comparison between different indicators. Importantly, all dashboard functionality collapses when this is printed out on the available black and white printers for stakeholders to reference.