In today’s data-driven healthcare environment, dashboards are more than just visual tools, they’re strategic assets. When designed with purpose, EHR-based dashboards can support clinical decision-making, highlight gaps in care, streamline workflows, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
Yet many health systems still struggle to implement dashboards that are both actionable and aligned with their goals. For life sciences companies, this represents an opportunity. While dashboards aren’t branded and their ROI may be harder to quantify, helping customers implement them signals your role as a digital health partner—not just a product vendor.
What Are EHR Dashboards?
EHR dashboards are a set of tailored reports built into the electronic health record to:
- Measure organizational performance
- Drill down to patient subgroups or individual provider performance
- Identify patients with care gaps or specific clinical characteristics
- Assist practices in managing groups of patients with complex therapies
Dashboards bring data to life. They pull from vast amounts of EHR data and surface information in formats that are meaningful to clinicians and care teams. When used well, dashboards help identify at-risk patients, accelerate diagnosis, enable evidence-based treatment, close gaps in care, and streamline how providers interact with the vast amount of data in their EHRs—transforming it into meaningful, actionable insights they can use more easily.
Don’t Just Take It from Us: Dashboards Proven in Practice
The impact of dashboards isn’t theoretical; research backs it up:
- A hypertension-specific dashboard improved adherence to prescribing guidelines and helped clinicians make faster, better-informed decisions. The dashboard provided a visual display of BP trends, targets, and medications—cutting encounter time while improving outcomes.
- In pediatric rheumatology, modifying EHR documentation to populate a local dashboard helped improve care documentation for patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.
- In oncology and chronic illness, dashboards incorporating patient-reported outcomes increased shared decision-making and helped clinicians tailor treatments based on evolving clinical needs.
These and other studies demonstrate that dashboards can reduce clinical inertia, support adherence to guidelines, and facilitate timely interventions.
What It Takes to Develop a Dashboard
Building a clinically valuable dashboard requires cross-functional collaboration and intentional design. Key steps typically include:
- Define the Purpose: Is the dashboard meant to close gaps in care, support guideline adherence, manage patients with complex therapies, or meet a quality metric? Establishing a clear goal helps focus development.
- Identify Key Measures: Select the metrics that matter most—such as lab values, overdue screenings, or treatment adherence. These should align with established best practices and evidence-based clinical guidelines to ensure the dashboard supports meaningful clinical action.
- Create Inclusion Criteria: Use diagnosis codes, test results, and patient history to define who should appear on the dashboard.
- Design the Reports: The dashboard must be usable. That means visually intuitive layouts and clear insights tailored to clinical or operational users.
- Make It Action-Oriented: A good dashboard doesn’t just display data, it prompts action. That could mean alerting providers about patients due for screening or not responding to treatment.
Let’s Talk Tactical Mix
If you’re thinking ahead to next year’s plans and wondering whether EHR dashboard support could be a useful tactic to support earlier diagnosis, improve treatment decisions, or align with provider quality goals in a specific disease state—let’s talk.
POCP can help you explore whether this approach makes sense for your brand and provide guidance on how dashboards can be created and deployed in a meaningful way.
