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Hospital Measures: Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions Dashboard

ACSC hospitalization rates have been suggested as an outcome-oriented measure of quality and capacity for primary care delivery. This
dashboard shows the trend in these rates for a group of hospitals.

Created by:
Neman Khokhar
Hospital Administrator
British Columbia, Canada
Also see his Abstracting & Submission Turnaround Dashboard

by Charley Kyd

Neman Khokhar, who has owned Dashboard Reporting With Excel for several years, explained the purpose of this report.

"Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions (ACSC’s)," he explained, "are specific conditions for which good outpatient or primary care can potentially prevent the need for hospitalization, decrease the length of time of hospitalization, or for which early intervention can prevent complications or more severe disease. This dashboard summarizes the ACSC’s at various levels: diagnosis within a specific facility, within several facilities and within a region."

As  I quoted him in Excel Dashboards in Hospitals & Clinics, he found the dashboard format useful because it allows him to present the data in an abbreviated form, which allows him to display more measures on one page. Although Neman said he's not a technical person, he created this dashboard from scratch, using the techniques explained in the book.

Notice that Neman's Legend explains more than the traditional chart series information. It also explains the numerical data that each chart figure contains. He uses a technique described in Chapter 3 of the book to return a numeric label within each chart, a label that updates each time he recalculates by pressing Excel's F9 key.

And notice how Neman uses colors in this dashboard. Blue headings = Northeast regions, Green headings = Northern Interior regions, and Red headings = Northwest regions. Also, notice the color coding on the left margin, which indicates various levels of consolidation of the data.

You can set up a similar report like this quickly and inexpensively with the product, IncSight DB.

Note to non-financial people: Excel users who work outside of Finance often write me to say that dashboards seem to be designed only for financial information. So if you're a non-financial person, notice that both of Neman's dashboards have nothing to do with finance.