Reducing unwarranted variation: can a 'clinical dashboard' be helpful for hospital executive boards and top-level leaders?

Background/aim: In the past decades, there has been an increasing focus on defining, identifying and reducing unwarranted variation in clinical practice. There have been several attempts to monitor and reduce unwarranted variation, but the experience so far is that these initiatives have failed to reach their goals. In this article, we present the initial process of developing a safety, quality and utilisation rate dashboard ('clinical dashboard') based on a selection of data routinely reported to executive boards and top-level leaders in Norwegian specialist healthcare.

Methods: We used a modified version of Wennberg's categorisation of healthcare delivery to develop the dashboard, focusing on variation in (1) effective care and patient safety and (2) preference-sensitive and supply-sensitive care.

Results: Effective care and patient safety are monitored with outcome measures such as 30-day mortality after hospital admission and 5-year cancer survival, whereas utilisation rates for procedures selected on cost and volume are used to follow variations in preference-sensitive and supply-sensitive care.

Conclusion: We argue that selecting quality indicators of patient safety, quality and utilisation rates and presenting them in a dashboard may help executive hospital boards and top-level leaders to focus on unwarranted variation.