Dashboard of DHB performance launched

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The Health Quality & Safety Commission has launched a dashboard of health system quality for consumers to see how different district health boards are performing in a variety of areas.

The dashboard collates information from a range of published sources including the Commission’s quality and safety markers, the primary care and inpatient patient experience surveys, the Atlas of Healthcare Variation and data from the Ministry of Health.

Commission director health quality intelligence Richard Hamblin says the publicly available dashboard is “another step towards openness and transparency in our health sector”.

It makes it easy for users to drill down into the data without having to look through several different areas on the Commission’s website.

“We wanted to make it easy for providers and consumers to access the various information that the Commission publishes about DHBs at a glance, including how this changes over time,” he says.

While the different measures cannot be combined to give a meaningful “overall score”, the dashboard can highlight patterns, explains Hamblin.

It is divided by domains of quality, such as safety, effectiveness and equity, and related measures are co-located within that.

“For example, various infection rates sit next to each other,” he says.

“This means that a cluster of dots in a similar position is likely to point to a consistent pattern for an issue. This can be checked by hovering over each dot to read details of each measure.

“There have been some great achievements made in these areas by DHBs, and we want to make sure they’re easy to view and understand.”

Hamblin says clinicians and managers have been actively involved during the dashboard’s development.

It is the first time data has been displayed in this way in New Zealand and there are only a few other examples internationally.

“Increasing international evidence shows that using visualisations to make data easily understandable can help stimulate improvements,” says Hamblin.

See a list of frequently asked questions about the dashboard of health system quality.

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