Your meeting with hospital stakeholders on designing a dashboard to better care for COVID-19 patients who are experiencing homelessness was a resounding success. Everyone was engaged and helped craft a problem statement, KPIs, and OKRs that you then presented to your hospital IT team. Luckily, IT has the bandwidth available to support developing this dashboard—but they need your help through the process. In today’s post, we’ll go over the second phase of designing …
HiQuiPs: Dashboards Demystified Part 1 – Problem Identification
You are working in an inner city emergency department (ED) and you notice that there are 10 patients who are waiting for their COVID-19 test results. You know that these patients are all experiencing homelessness but you have no idea if they were all exposed at one place, what symptoms they’re experiencing, and how best to inform your local public health department. You create a spreadsheet to start keeping track of these details …
HiQuiPs: Using dashboards to supercharge clinical care and quality improvement
Odds are in your favourite sci-fi movie or TV show, a character spends time looking at a dashboard to determine their next course of action. However, dashboards are not limited to sci-fi! Many organizations across sectors make daily use of dashboards to run smoothly and work towards their goals. St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health Toronto has designed, developed, and ultimately deployed dashboards to solve real-world problems. Examples include supporting community partners by …
HiQuiPs: Quality Improvement Projects and Patient Reported Measures
You are about to start a Quality Improvement (QI) project in your ED. You have noted that clinicians are being interrupted frequently by patient questions about the ED process and non patient care related inquiries. You have read previously that emergency physicians were being interrupted an average of 9.7 times per hour and may result in a break in tasks, which may lead to negative patient safety implications.1–3 You have set up a …
HiQuiPs: Year in Review
It has already been one year since we launched the HiQuiPs (Health informatics, Quality Improvement, Patient Safety) series on CanadiEM. This year we had fifteen contributors from across the country, and over 15,000 page visits to our series. Over the past year, we have produced thirteen posts over the HiQuiPs interrelated fields: Quality Improvement: On QI, we introduced what is quality of care in the ED, then to guide our readers through the …
HiQuiPs: Introduction to Biomedical and Health Informatics and its Role in the Emergency Department
You are attending your departmental monthly team meeting where you are all discussing your emergency department’s (ED) plan to switch to an electronic healthcare record (EHR) system in the coming months. There is also a lot of discussion about utilizing more health informatics tools to improve patient care. The presenter discusses the emerging role of health informatics in the ED, as well as the utility of connecting to regional health information exchanges. You …