Healthcare Dashboard Examples to Improve Decision-Making through Design
Healthcare executives often must quickly make informed decisions that affect the trajectory of their business. How can they best access and analyze the key performance indicators (KPIs) needed to make those decisions? By referring to well-designed healthcare dashboards.
Using tools such as Looker, Power BI, and Tableau, healthcare organizations can integrate customizable, interactive dashboards into their reporting to improve decision-making across a range of areas – from healthcare facility operations and surgeon performance to pharmaceutical sales and more. We’ve compiled several healthcare dashboard examples to illustrate a variety of use cases and a sampling of dashboard design best practices to help your organization make the most of your data.
A Healthcare Dashboard Using Data Science
A healthcare dashboard like this one demonstrates how a company could use data science to determine sales projections – in this case, pharmaceutical sales – and guide their field reps’ sales activities. To make the information easy to digest, this dashboard uses the rule of thirds (a design principle that draws a viewer’s eye to points of interest – you’ll notice variations on the rule of thirds throughout these healthcare dashboard examples):
- New prescription (NRx) and total prescription (TRx) values at the top make goals and expectations easily accessible.
- A visual in the middle illustrates the TRx projection over time, also broken down into specific drugs for competitive analysis.
- Customer segmentation comparisons at the bottom provide broader context and more actionable information about doctors prescribing the company’s drugs. This section indicates the company’s most valuable customers and the areas where their competitors are seeing higher growth, allowing them to target accordingly.
Combining projections and customer segmentation information from a dashboard like this one, a company can adjust their sales strategy as necessary or determine they don’t need to change their sales plan to meet their goals.
A Customized Healthcare Dashboard in Tableau
This dashboard provides quick and easy insight into the financials and patient visits specific to this organization’s California healthcare facilities. It shows the most valuable metrics at the top of the dashboard and enables executives to drill into those that warrant further investigation below.
Using a custom map feature in Tableau, company executives can quickly see which zip codes generate the most revenue and, even more specifically, which individual facilities contribute the most patient encounters. Users are able to uncover areas of improvement across the business such as facilities with lower levels of visits than expected or a revenue-to-encounter ratio not meeting profitability expectations. Conversely, this dashboard also highlights successful facilities that less-successful facilities can model themselves after.
A Regional Healthcare Finance Dashboard
This dashboard showing clinical practice financial data and patient visit information would be referenced by two audiences: the clinical practice’s financial team and the practice owner. In this case, the owner is a private equity firm. Including overall financial performance and that of individual practices in one healthcare finance dashboard allows the private equity firm to understand practice financial data in context.
The heat map provides an easy-to-digest visual to communicate location-specific patient encounter information. Each clinical practice can reference the map to see how the number of patient encounters correlates to their individual financial information, and the private equity firm can understand how location impacts operating costs and revenue across multiple nearby facilities. They’re able to see which clinics and which zip codes bring in the greatest net revenue, allowing them to strategically approach potential new healthcare practice acquisitions.
An Interactive Surgeon Performance Dashboard
Hospital administrators and department heads would use a dashboard like this to evaluate surgeons’ performance. This could be the average time spent in the operating room for a specific surgery, patients’ average time in the hospital recovering after surgery, or how patients fare in emergency surgeries vs. planned surgeries. Alternatively, surgeons could evaluate themselves and learn about areas for improvement.
Using multiple spreadsheets to dig into the factors relevant to a surgical department evaluation can be time-consuming and confusing. Instead, this healthcare dashboard example provides a high-level view of a neurology department and also details regarding each surgeon. The dashboard is interactive, so users can filter in many ways to evaluate one surgeon or multiple surgeons against each other.
A user can easily identify potential issues, such as a surgeon spending a significant amount of time in the operating room for very few surgeries. Department heads can then drill down further into the average age of patients, the surgeries performed, and how many surgeries were planned vs. emergency to see if those factors explain the amount of time spent, all without having to reference multiple spreadsheets or dashboards.
A High-Level Sales KPI Dashboard
Similar to the dashboard using data science shared at the beginning of this post, this highly visual dashboard gives the user a quick overview of KPIs. The user would likely be high-level sales employees at a pharmaceutical company who don’t want to be bogged down with details upfront. However, they can click through this “nine-box stoplight” to get more information as needed.
A user could click on the box showing the change in NBRx (prescriptions for patients who are new to the brand) to see related trends or details about specific sales reps that contributed to this “green light,” a positive indicator. They could then investigate the negative change in TRx by clicking on that box. Pulling in only the details the user needs, they are better able to explain these numbers without the distraction of unrelated details. Perhaps the brand saw great growth in the number of distinct HCPs (healthcare providers) prescribing NBRx but not prescribing high enough volume of RRx (returning patients) to positively affect TRx. Or maybe a high-performing sales rep was on maternity leave and therefore not selling this month, causing a temporary drop in TRx.
A Dialysis Clinic Dashboard in Looker
Dialysis facility owners, administrators, and directors can use a dashboard like this one, created using Looker, to track dialysis machine utilization and allocate machine staffing needs based on location. This dashboard tells a full story with data, moving from a broad picture of total patient encounters, through dialysis-specific encounters, and drilling into details at the facility level.
Like the previous healthcare dashboard examples, this dashboard is driven by the rule of thirds. It first provides KPIs, then highly visual representations of location-specific information (both individual facilities and another zip code heat map), and finally a broader data point broken down based on time. Within one dashboard, a user can understand their data from multiple viewpoints to draw varied, in-depth insights.
These healthcare dashboard examples demonstrate how a well-designed dashboard can uniquely meet the needs of a range of healthcare-related organizations. Healthcare executives can make the most of their data and empower their business users with customizable, interactive dashboards. To learn how 2nd Watch could help your healthcare organization develop dashboards that best suit your needs, set up a complimentary healthcare analytics whiteboard session.
