Your Dashboard Looks Great… Until The Numbers Don’t

Numbers can light the way or lead us astray. We break down how to build dashboards in long-term care that leaders can actually trust, from defining a “fall with major injury” to validating every step between an incident report and a board-ready chart. As a registered nurse and healthcare analyst, I share a practical blueprint for turning quality data into safer care, faster decisions, and fewer surprises.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello, I will be your host. My name is Deanna Fi. I am a registered nurse and healthcare analyst. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

The views or opinions expressed in this podcast are for informational purposes only, not intended as legal or professional advice, and may not represent those of Verity Consulting. Although we make strong efforts to make sure our information is accurate at the time the podcast episode was recorded, Verity Consulting cannot guarantee that all information in this podcast is always correct, complete, or up to date. All information in this podcast is subject to change without notice.

What Are We Measuring Exactly

Designing Useful And Clear Dashboards

Definitions And Timeframes Matter

Data Integrity And Validation Basics

OIG Expectations And Benchmarking

Tracing Numbers Back To Source

When Reports And Dashboards Don’t Match

Audits, Trust, And Verify

Why Accuracy Drives Decisions

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Well, welcome to Vital Compliance Insights. Today will be a discussion about dashboards in long-term care facilities. What is a dashboard? Why do we use dashboards? And also I'll talk about data integrity and data validation. So this will be very brief today, because it's an introductory session. I'll have some future episodes where we analyze certain key elements, certain metrics that would be on a dashboard, for example. So an example would be in a long-term care facility, falls. And when I talk about falls, it could be a whole number, how many falls occurred in a 30-day period. So it's important to know is this a representation, a number of a whole number of the number of falls? Is it a percentage? Is it the percentage? So we we need to know this information on how it's recorded. Now, we know the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, they provide quality measure data from represented from databases, and they talk about percentages of falls. So it's important to just be clear on how the dashboard will represent data, whatever the data is. Okay. So now you have a dashboard that provides information and data on key quality metrics, things that are important to track, trend, and monitor. So I will just stop here and say, I have seen some dashboards that are pretty, pretty savvy. You'll just see the first page and it'll have a listing of the quality metrics. It'll have information on measurements on how well the facility is doing. It may even have a special feature where you can open up that individual quality measure, that element, to look at trends and look at some historical things. So there's all kinds of ways dashboards can be created to provide as much information as possible to whomever is viewing it. This could be staff viewing it, this could be the board. So making sure that the dashboard's easy to understand and follow. I will say it's important too to make sure that definitions are clearly understood. So what is the definition when we say we are measuring the incidence of residents who fell with a major injury? What does fall with major injury mean? That has to be clear. Timeframes, the time frame for when we are measuring the data needs to be very, it's very important. And so all of this is going to lead to, at some point in time, we're going to want to go look to make sure, the compliance committee is going to want to go make sure that the data represented on the dashboard is accurate. And this is where data integrity is important, and the validation process of that data is very important. So in my past experiences as a monitor conducting corporate integrity agreements, one of the important features is the Office of Inspector General is saying, does this organization have a dashboard, a quality of care dashboard to keep track of what's happening to ensure that the facility is measuring activity related to the incidents, and that would be benchmarked against state, national indicators. So this is not a foreign concept. Long-term care facilities are very familiar with that quality measures. So a compliance committee, a compliance officer, will definitely want to make sure that definitions are clear, time frames are very clear, that the key stakeholders, the people who collect the data and take that data and put it into these files and charts, everyone knows what they're doing. So what you'd want to do is take that dashboard number, whatever it is, the number of falls, the percentages of falls, and take that at face value. And then what you want to do is go, if you will, swim upstream and go backwards to see who collected it, when, what was their process. Show me how you got this data. And I bring this up because in my experience as a monitor, I have seen where one report will say this is how many falls we had in a period of time. But then when you look at the dashboard, it's not matching. So that's when certainly, you know, you're going to want to pull that little thread to see, okay, where's this going to lead us? Is this going to unravel? And it's so important to make sure that the validation of data is part of a compliance committee's role, to have some periodic audits, random audits. Now, certainly if you identify concerns, then you're going to want to put things in place more frequently. But at minimum, just I want to trust the data, but I let me just go verify it. Let me just go double check and make sure. Because that's certainly very important in health care. Why is that important? Well, decisions are made based on the data reported on dashboard decisions. What I mean by that is the allocation of resources to care for residents. You know, it could be at a level where the board makes decisions and says, hey, oh, it looks like everything's going well. You must be doing great. When here you come to find that actually the numbers are not accurate. So that would be a big caution for anyone if you're going to develop a dashboard, which I highly recommend that you would put things into place to do some data integrity, some data validation processes. And again, this is not a new concept. There are so many resources out there to help put together meaningful and useful dashboards to help track and trend and provide some guidance on where are we going? Are we doing what we need to do? And if and if not, why? Helping us to have some root cause analysis and gap analysis on where are things falling through the cracks. So this was just a brief overview, just a brief introduction, and then I will have some future speakers coming in to talk about key indicators, quality indicators, and we can flesh this out a little bit more. And hopefully it'll make more sense with some actual examples. So thank you very much for listening and stay tuned for the next episodes coming up. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Your time is appreciated. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Vital Compliance Insights and found this to be informative. Please feel free to reach out to Verity Consulting at VerityTeam.com if you'd like further assistance with your healthcare compliance needs. Stay tuned for the next episode.