MH trust builds ward to board dashboard

Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust has created an in-house clinical dashboard that lets clinicians view their own revalidation data.

Clinicians can view their patient outcomes, risk assessments and personal professional development data on the dashboard, which is available on the trust’s intranet.

The trust’s informatics director, Darren McKenna, told EHI the trust had created the dashboard using its own IT team because there was nothing on the market that did what the trust and its clinicians wanted.

“It’s an in-house development because we couldn’t find anything on the market. We fill in the gaps where the market doesn’t meet our needs,” he said.

There are three different versions of the dashboard, one for individual clinicians, one for the ward teams, and one for the board.

The individual ‘my dashboard’ functionality means clinicians can view their patients’ outcomes and risk assessments. The data is the same that gets reported to the CQC and the trust board.

Jonathan Richardson, the trust’s chief clinical information officer and clinical director for urgent care, said he was keen to show off the “great functionalities” of the system.

“My dashboard has some of my revalidation data, which is very useful. It shows if something is overdue, so I know what needs doing,” he said.

“With the clinical dashboard you have a visual display for length of stay, this enables clinical teams to look at differences between wards. Having the same information, which goes from ward to board, is key.”

Richardson said it was not always easy to get clinicians excited enough about IT to use it.

Users wanted to see benefits, but benefits could not be seen until IT had been used.

“With any change clinicians will go through various stages and some clinicians are now at the stage of accepting some clinical informatics systems, but there is still much more that could be done in terms of usability," he added.

The dashboard had helped, because it had been welcomed and was widely used across the trust.

McKenna said 90% of staff had used ‘my dashboard’ in the last three months and it was voted one of the top two things in the trust.

EHI reporter Lis Evenstad recently visited Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust to hear about the dashboards and other IT developments. Read about her trip in Insight.