Effective Healthcare Dashboards – a solution to information inundation

This week my friend Ahmad Chamy is taking over The Data Daily emails. He’s the Founder/CEO of D Cubed Analytics a Healthcare Analytics firm specializing in Power BI and Microsoft suite of technologies. This week he’s writing about how to communicate effectively with data (either in Healthcare or anywhere else). Check out the emails from Monday and Tuesday​

--------------

A dashboard is a tool that decision-makers use to rapidly monitor current conditions that require a timely response to fulfill a specific role. Dashboards, as opposed to conventional reports, are action-oriented vs. strictly informative.

Characteristics of effective dashboards are:

• Action Oriented

• Purposeful Visualization

• High Impact

• Interactive

Here are 8 Best Practices for Effective Dashboards:​
​ 1. Leverage Pre-Attentive Attributes: A preattentive attribute is a term for things that people notice without even noticing they've noticed them. In data visualization – especially when dashboarding - this means viewers will instantaneously see specific visual cues designed to leverage attributes of preattentive processing. Some examples of Pre-Attentive Attributes are (1) Color (2) Form and (3) Spatial position.

2. Understand your Audience: Gather Business and Data Requirements using stakeholder and end-use interviews and form personas to appropriately capture the audience you are building your dashboard.

3. Leverage an Iterative Approach to Dashboard Development: Apply agile Project Management principles to tackling dashboard development.

4. Use the Guided Analytics Approach for Dashboard Layout: Understanding your audience’s mental models and building dashboards that follow their decision-making process will mean your dashboards will be used and not be shelved in your data platform.

5. Appropriately Select Visuals: There are lots of data visuals to choose from. Understanding how quantitative and qualitative data should be visualized is crucial.

6. Design User-Friendly Charts: Eliminate Chart Junk and build simple yet impactful data graphs.

7. Avoid Data Visualization Pitfalls: Learn how data visualizations can distort and skew data findings causing confusion to avoid them.

8. Set Goals for Dashboard Benefit Realization: Dashboard development projects’ success does not just depend on the delivery of the product but rather the active use of the dashboards in decision-making. It's important to have strategies to train users on the dashboards and to measure the adoption and usage of these dashboards.

In tomorrow’s post, we will talk about some strategies for making your numbers more impactful and tactics to ensure data is properly understood by your business users.

Ahmad

for The Data Shop