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A Hospital Administrator Shows How
Excel Dashboards Improve Outcomes 

These Excel dashboards, created by a 'non-technical' hospital administrator, help
to monitor healthcare activities and improve patient care.

by Charley Kyd

I recently exchanged emails with Neman Khokhar, a hospital administrator in Canada. Having just assembled the page of hospitals that use Kyd dashboards, I asked him why so many hospitals and clinics are using my dashboards.

"In healthcare, there has been a lot of attention recently paid to patient safety, quality improvement, and measurement," he wrote. "I'm using your Excel dashboard method to apply towards quality improvement teams as well as to general indicators."

Neman sent me two of his dashboards. To see them in full size, along with an explanation about their use, click either of the reduced images to the right.

Neman explained that most hospitals, or at least those in Canada, monitor indicators like:

• Volume of patients (total number of visits)
• Total days in hospital
• % of planned vs. unplanned readmissions
• Mortality rates
• Turnaround times for various tests / procedures / processes
• Top 25 CMGs (Case Mix Groups - or Diagnostically Related Groups in the US)

Quality Improvement Teams, he wrote, use specific performance indicators. This helps them determine if changes in their processes make any difference in outcomes.

"An increasing number of healthcare clients have been looking at metrics and measurement recently," he wrote. "because healthcare has been relatively slow to adopt a lot of the measures that many other industries have used.

"As I am mostly a health services administrator rather than a technical person, I have not applied all of your techniques for updating of dashboards. But I have used many of the principles to summarize data and create what is termed a 'family of measures' on a single page.

"The real advantage for me has been that, since I'm monitoring several hospitals at one time, or several physicians at one time, or even several diagnosis/procedures at one time, the techniques for creating small charts are of particular use, allowing me to present the data in an abbreviated form."

Other topics of interest:

• Dashboard Reporting With Excel taught Neman how to create these dashboards.
   
• Biotech, Drug, and Medical Equipment Companies That Use Excel Dashboards features large healthcare companies around the world that use Kyd dashboards.
   
• The home page for our dashboard users area introduces the many other countries and business sectors that use Kyd dashboards.
   
• When Should Large Companies Use "Real" Dashboards And Excel Dashboard Reports? explains why Excel users should use Excel dashboards even if they have commercial dashboard software available.
   
• The Catalog Page introduces all my dashboard solutions.