From Healthcare Analytics to Action, Beyond Insights to data-informed plans
The increasing availability of data in the Danish healthcare system has promoted the creation of a wide range of reports and dashboards to summarize this information. However, how these translate into action is not always so clear, and here “action dashboards” can be very useful.
Dashboards consist of visualizations such as line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts, and particularly for operational dashboards, these should be designed to be "actionable." A nurse, an operator, a doctor, or an administrator should be able to take action after spending time interpreting a dashboard, in a continuous cycle of adaptation.
However, determining appropriate activity changes requires the following:
- Does the visualization communicate something useful? (design relevance)
- Can users figure out what that useful bit of information is after studying the visualization? (data literacy)
- Can users figure out what to do based on that useful bit of information? (instructional design literacy)
Problems with Design relevance
The design of dashboards frequently begins with the question, “What is the data available for visualizations?” Once that question is answered, the discussion moves on to questions like “what are reasonable ways to visualize the data?" Which would be easiest to understand? "Which would be most beautiful?” Only rarely is the question asked, “What do we hope a user will actually do after looking at this dashboard?” By starting with the data, analysis is seldom begun with the end in mind.
Problems with Data Literacy
Even if dashboard design begins with the end in mind, the effective use of dashboards still depends entirely on the user’s levels of data literacy and instructional design literacy. Not all users are comfortable interpreting graphs. There’s no guarantee that even a majority of users will "read through” a visualization to grasp the useful information it’s trying to convey. And even though most modern users will have taken at least one math or quantitative literacy course, the vast majority of them will not have had any formal training in instructional design. As a result, it is unlikely that they are familiar with the best solutions based on the useful data they have gleaned from the dashboard.
Action Dashboards instead of actionable dashboards
By merely transforming raw data into visualizations, one must first hope that users will have the necessary data literacy to properly understand the visualizations and then further hope that users will have the instructional design literacy required to take action with the information.
To address this, dashboard designers can instead integrate the necessary data literacy and instructional design literacy into the design of the dashboards themselves to rather present the users with a list of specific actions they might consider taking, thus changing the discussion from interpretation to measuring concrete action.
Therefore, an "action dashboard" is a dashboard that includes specific actions that a user might think about taking and is presented in the context of 5 areas:
- What should be done? Identify the specific action that users should consider taking.
- Why should it be done? Explain why they should consider taking it.
- When should it be done? How soon should they decide whether or not to take action?
- Who should do it? Name each patient, resource with regard to whom users should consider taking action.
- Where it be done? In what format, with what tools, or in what place should users take the action?
Action Dashboards can be used effectively by users, nurses, operators, doctors or administrators, regardless of their levels of data literacy or instructional design literacy
However, action dashboards also present some disadvantages. Power users may feel constrained by action dashboards, but these users can be given alternative views that are better suited to their levels of analysis literacy. Also, action dashboards require a change in the analysis process to create them, particularly in the identification of potential actions.
