The Association’s Quality Council spent a portion of their time in 2010 reviewing quality dashboards for nursing facilities, brainstorming on nursing facility quality dashboard measures, and “whittling down” a lengthy list of measures to arrive at our “TOP TEN” list of measures to include in our inaugural Nursing Facility Quality Dashboard.  During the first quarter of 2011, organizations from the Quality Council did a beta test of the dashboard and its instructions and now we are ready to release this new resource to our membership.  So, get ready!  Nursing facilities in our membership will soon be receiving both an instruction sheet and Excel spreadsheet in early April from us, and we strongly encourage you to use this tool.   Here are a few of the more commonly asked questions we experienced during the process.

Q: My organization has its own multiple-dimension dashboard.  How is this different?

A: What we found in our research is many organizations have operational dashboards with dozens of measures to help them with operations.  What they didn’t have is a breakdown of key measures that could be visually displayed to a variety of internal and external stakeholders.

Q: Why are there only ten measures, and how were they selected??

A: The list of potential measures was rather lengthy—in order to make the quality dashboard functional in a variety of ways, there should only be a few measures—ten is likely too many but we couldn’t whittle it down any more.  We categorized the original list of measures and selected the more valuable ones from each category, keeping in mind that there needed to be readily accessible data to populate the spreadsheet.

Q: How should this dashboard be used?

A: The dashboard is designed in an easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet format so you can add your own data and then display the data in a graph format.  We envision this visual document to be a tool that can be shared with boards, management staff, families, internal quality improvement teams, and even expanded to all staff.

Q: Why is this dashboard just for nursing facilities—can we use it for our housing operations as well?

A: Unfortunately, we have limited data sources at this time for our housing/home care members.  One of the tasks of the Quality Council this year is to review what could be made available for our housing/home care members and begin the development of a quality dashboard for this segment of our membership.

Patti Cullen, CAE
952.851.2487
pcullen@careproviders.org

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