Digital leadership in action in a hospital through a real time dashboard system implementation and experience

Abstract

Background: Regulatory and competitive pressures and the need for cross-organizational data sharing are demanding that hospital leaders create a data-driven decision making culture to improve performance. Using an innovation assimilation strategy framework, this paper describes how a hospital used its implementation of a Real Time Dashboard System (rtDashboard) to improve performance, change its organizational culture and put it on a path towards digital leadership (DL).
Objective: Implement an rtDashboard system that can support a data-driven decision making culture for performance improvement while engaging business and information technology (IT) leaders in DL practice.
Results: The rtDashboard contributed significantly to monitoring hospital performance and influenced change in unit level decision making that was aligned with hospital goals. The rtDashboard implementation not only provided substantial performance improvement and quality benchmarking, but also changed the responsibility and accountability culture and helped the hospital put in practice DL principles to support future innovations.
Conclusions: DL through rtDashboard is a demonstration of how a hospital can seek and strive for excellence. As much as dashboards are pivotal to organizational performance monitoring at the senior leadership level, the process used to diffuse it to every operational unit in support of a data-driven decision making culture showcases how hospital executives and IT leaders can work together to continually align and re-align their strategies to reach organizational goals – the core of DL practice.