Enhancing patient outcomes and service performance through the use of a Clinical Dashboard

Managing the needs of a large population of people with complex symptoms in the largest community specialist palliative care service in Australia requires a strong commitment to resource management. Our service cares for almost 3000 people each year and has been actively involved in the Palliative Care Outcome Collaborative a national quality initiative since its inception. We recognised the benefit of using this data to inform daily decision-making and went onto develop an electronic clinical dashboard showing clinical assessment information for all clients including trending in care. This visual encourages and influences clinical dialog, practice review, resource allocation and discharge planning. The use of the dashboard has enhanced our performance against the national benchmarks. The implementation of the dashboard provided an opportunity to engage the whole team and enhance consistency in the use of palliative care assessment tools. This team involvement has influenced care delivery and improved the quality of care for our clients. The positive benefits of the dashboard have led to investment into similar tools across other service areas. With the successes of the dashboard it is recognised our focus needs to include sustainability strategies so we implemented dashboard into our orientation programme and provide ongoing updates to staff. Within our service this tool has become main stream with its application for care planning and service delivery continually evolve.