Nursing dashboards are transforming clinical services management as nurses monitor organizational performance and drill down to diagnose problem areas to establish priorities and design interventions for change. Grundy County Memorial Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Grundy Center, Iowa, uses analytics to create reports to track quality measures identified as best practices. Hospital leadership and clinicians use these reports to improve patient outcomes and ensure compliance with federal programs such as meaningful use and the Quality Payment Program.

A performance-improvement initiative to implement evidence-based practices and eliminate central line-associated bloodstream infections uses analytics tools. Patient care leaders track and report central line infection rates to the hospital’s quality manager.

“One tool that we use to do this is the central-line bundle on the nursing dashboard,” says Jody Schipper, R.N., nursing services director at Grundy County Memorial. “This displays things such as hand hygiene, barrier precautions and a daily review to evaluate whether the line is still necessary for this patient. Prevention of central-line infections improves patient outcomes and avoids additional costs of treating preventable infections.”

Best-practice alerts are built into the electronic health record to prompt clinicians on appropriate interventions when certain criteria are met. For example, upon admission when the patient is screened as a high risk for falls, the EHR prompts the clinician to implement a fall-prevention care plan.

Checklist:

  • Update information technology infrastructure to offer redundancy and fault tolerance, ensuring that providers have access to the EHR and supporting applications during a patient encounter.
  • Use analytics to drive performance improvements.
  • Create reports to track quality measures identified as best practices.
  • Use reports to improve patient outcomes and ensure compliance with federal programs.
  • Build best-practice alerts into the EHR to prompt clinicians on appropriate interventions.