Healthcare data is complicated. Organizations have to track everything from patient satisfaction scores to insurance claim processing times. What’s the best way for healthcare organizations to analyze and present it all in one place?
Power BI dashboards make it possible. These dashboards are designed to generate detailed visualizations and help you find the trends and patterns that matter most.
How Are Power BI Dashboards Used in Healthcare Settings?
A Power BI dashboard is a tool that’s available in Microsoft’s Power BI software service. The dashboard displays data and visualizations on a single page, called a canvas.
The information on the canvas can be as complicated or as simple as you want. For instance, if you want a full picture of a hospital’s budget and revenue at a glance, you can display dozens of financial charts on a single page. If you want to focus on just one healthcare data set, like emergency room wait times, the Power BI dashboard will only show you the data related to this specific issue.
Power BI dashboards are especially beneficial for healthcare organizations because:
- They help healthcare executives identify trends in the data;
- Dashboards improve internal communication between stakeholders and healthcare staff; and
- Every department can create their own visualizations and generate insights.
These three benefits significantly improve your facility’s internal operations as well as the healthcare services you provide.
Power BI Dashboards Display Important Data Trends
One of the main reasons why Power BI dashboards are essential is because they help users make sense of many different sets of data at once. Healthcare providers must keep detailed data on every aspect of the business, including:
- Internal operations (such as room turnover times);
- The patient experience (such as patient satisfaction scores); and
- Staffing (such as healthcare provider salaries).
If you keep this business intelligence data in a spreadsheet or in the cloud without converting it into a visual form, it’s easy to miss vital insights and connections between the data sets.
When patient satisfaction scores are low, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause. Is the waiting room too cramped? Is the doctor’s bedside manner poor? Should you provide more amenities in patient rooms?
Rather than guessing what might be wrong and wasting money and time on solutions that have little effect, Power BI dashboards show you evidence-based causes and solutions on a single canvas. Because the Power BI software already has access to all of the data you collect, you can generate visualizations of multiple data sets and compare them side by side.
With this method, it’s possible to find connections between two seemingly unrelated data sets. You may find that patient satisfaction is poor because your hospital is understaffed during certain hours of the day. You can focus your time and resources on hiring more staff during these periods. Having all of this information on one canvas helps you make the best decisions for your patients, staff, and budget.
Power BI Dashboards Improve Communications
Power Bi dashboards make internal communications among staff, management, and stakeholders much smoother. This is a common challenge in most medical facilities because there are multiple departments that handle different aspects of the business and they rarely interact with each other directly.
For example, surgeons and investors may never have a conversation with each other. However, both are indirectly impacted by each other’s needs and goals. A surgeon requires the best medical equipment and support staff to perform surgeries safely. Investors and stakeholders also want to provide excellent care to patients, but they expect to get a return on their investments as well. They have an interest in running the hospital as leanly and efficiently as possible.
There’s a way to balance all of these needs. Power BI dashboards make it easy to share important reports with all members of the team and ask for feedback or ideas. You can share internal data about performance with members of your staff and find ways to improve workflows and efficiency. Later, you can use Power BI dashboards to generate visualizations for stakeholders showing that staff efficiency has recently improved.
Dashboards keep everyone on task, especially when you have one for each individual department. Every member of your team should know how to use this essential tool.
You Can Customize Power BI Dashboards for Every Department
One benefit of Power BI dashboards over other types of visualization tools is that you can customize them to fit each department’s workflow and data needs.
Healthcare organizations generally need separate dashboards for each of these departments:
- Financial dashboards: This dashboard is used to generate visualizations for expenses, revenue, insurance billing, insurance claim denials, staff salaries, and all other budget concerns.
- Patient dashboards: These visualizations focus on patient data, such as how many patients visit the facility, their length of stay, and overall patient satisfaction.
- Staff dashboards: Visualizations that show how well staff perform. This includes punctuality, patient-to-staff ratio, and how many patients each staff member sees per day.
The reason why you should have separate Power BI dashboards for these three areas of operation is because it helps them generate more meaningful visualizations.
Stakeholders are most interested in financial visualizations. Using a custom dashboard, you can create graphs and reports that make sense to a business-oriented audience who may not have a great deal of experience with data analysis.
Your staff is most interested in patient metrics and staff performance visualizations. By making visualizations that show them how to improve their care or productivity, you’ll make your point more effectively.
Power BI dashboards are really just a communication tool. They take complicated data and make it more accessible to decision-makers and healthcare providers.
How to Create the Best Power BI Dashboard for Your Facility
To make the best use of this tool in your healthcare organization, contact an IT firm that specializes in Power BI services. The firm will help you set up individual dashboards that fit all of your departments’ needs and can even train your staff on creating visualizations from multiple data sets. With help from the experts, you can see all of the benefits of Power BI dashboards and begin making better evidence-based decisions.
Contact Tek Leaders today to learn more about the Power BI support services we offer. Our team of Power BI dashboard experts will walk you through all of the software’s features and craft custom dashboards for you from scratch.If you have more questions about this process, you can reach us by email directly.
Shashank Reddy Tummala.
