The Impact of Visualization Dashboards on Quality of Care and Clinician Satisfaction: Integrative Literature Review (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Intensive Care Units (ICUs) in the United States admit more than 5.7 million people each year. The ICU level of care helps people with life-threatening illness or injuries and involves close, constant attention by a team of specially-trained health care providers. Delay between condition onset and implementation of necessary interventions can dramatically impact the prognosis of patients with life-threatening diagnoses. Evidence supports a connection between information overload and medical errors. A tool that improves display and retrieval of key clinical information has great potential to benefit patient outcomes. The purpose of this review is to synthesize research on the use of visualization dashboards in health care. OBJECTIVE The purpose of conducting this literature review is to synthesize previous research on the use of dashboards visualizing electronic health record information for health care providers. A review of the existing literature on this subject can be used to identify gaps in prior research and to inform further research efforts on this topic. Ultimately, this evidence can be used to guide the development, testing, and implementation of a new solution to optimize the visualization of clinical information, reduce clinician cognitive overload, and improve patient outcomes. METHODS Articles were included if they addressed the development, testing, implementation, or use of a visualization dashboard solution in a health care setting. An initial search was conducted of literature on dashboards only in the intensive care unit setting, but there were not many articles found that met the inclusion criteria. A secondary follow-up search was conducted to broaden the results to any health care setting. The initial and follow-up searches returned a total of 17 articles that were analyzed for this literature review. RESULTS Visualization dashboard solutions decrease time spent on data gathering, difficulty of data gathering process, cognitive load, time to task completion, errors, and improve situation awareness, compliance with evidence-based safety guidelines, usability, and navigation. CONCLUSIONS Researchers can build on the findings, strengths, and limitations of the work identified in this literature review to bolster development, testing, and implementation of novel visualization dashboard solutions. Due to the relatively few studies conducted in this area, there is plenty of room for researchers to test their solutions and add significantly to the field of knowledge on this subject.

Toward a Learning Health Care System: A Systematic Review and Evidence-Based Conceptual Framework for Implementation of Clinical Analytics in a Digital Hospital

“…Between 2014 and 2018, seven reviews were identified that were relevant to the implementation of dashboards within health care organizations. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 These reviews encompassed 148 individual studies published between 1996 and 2017. The key areas of scope expansion, clarified in Table 1 , were in the definition of included dashboards, the source of data, whether the data were real-time, whether the dashboard was implemented and the targeted health care setting.…”

“…With respect to RQ-2, Supplementary Table S2 (available in the online version) lists eight approaches to overcoming some of the challenges identified. All of the approaches were sourced from Khairat et al 15 and of the eight identified, five directly related to the design of the dashboard, leaving just three related to the broader implementation processes. Given the large number of implementation challenges identified across the seven review studies (i.e., 34), it was surprising to find so little research reporting on best practice clinical dashboard implementation.…”