An on-line dashboard to facilitate monitoring of provincial ICU bed occupancy in Alberta, Canada

Abstract

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds are among the most valuable hospital resources for which demands periodically exceed supplies. Hence monitoring and management of utilization of these resources is essential for providing an efficient and equitable service. The purpose of this article is to describe the design, development and utilization of a dashboard for the measurement of occupancy and management of capacity of a provincial network of ICUs. The dashboard utilizes the exiting hospital data sources and infrastructure to provide a timely snapshot of bed utilization as well as a historical view of unit occupancy and enables simulation scenarios for capacity planning in a dispersed geographical location. This information is used by administration for managing the scarce ICU resources and helping with standardization of admit and discharge processes to and from intensive care units in order to enhance efficiency. In our case, the existing hospital information systems proved to contain reliable data and the existing information technology infrastructure owned proper resources to be accessed to develop such valuable tool. Such dashboard presents necessary information to facilitate understanding of capacity and bed utilization and can help create a sense of community and standardization of critical care services which would eventually contribute to a more equitable and efficient health system.

Dashboards for improving patient care: Review of the literature

“…In the United States (US), the Hospital Compare website (http://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html) provides information about the quality of care at over 4000 hospitals receiving public funding to help consumers make decisions about where to get healthcare and to encourage hospitals to improve the quality of care that they deliver. In Canada online clinical and financial dashboards have been employed by national, provincial, regional and hospital organizations to report on indicators of health system performance such as mortality and birth rates, admission and readmission rates, emergency room visits and wait times (too illustrate a few) [8][9][10][11][12].…”

Forecasting Hospital Room and Ward Occupancy Using Static and Dynamic Information Concurrently: Retrospective Single-Center Cohort Study

“…Through an online dashboard, it can provide timely information regarding bed availability, enabling intelligent management of patient movements related to admission and discharge. It facilitates shared responsibilities within the hospital and simplifies future resource planning [25].…”

Visualization for Quality Healthcare: Patient Flow Exploration

“…the time during which the patient is forced to a passive wait due to a lack of resources of some kind. In the scope of this project, we were aimed to develop an advanced simulation tool which, in addition to beds (see Shahpori et al [1]), could consider other resources including personnel. For this purpose, predefined standard treatment flowcharts should be correlated with the patient flow data and resource availability data.…”