In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, nursing leadership is often faced with pressure, driven by organizational goals, to design workflows that are efficient and effective. Although the burden of designing efficient workflows falls heavily on nurse leaders, they often lack tools to do this successfully. Data available in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) do not provide information needed to help nurses streamline their daily workflows.

The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Radiology department faced similar issues. While other sections within the department were successfully using dashboards to drive their daily work, the Radiology Information System (RIS) in the EMR was not well designed to capture nursing workflows.

The department embarked on a project to identify relevant metrics and create a high value but low-touch dashboard providing real-time indicators for the nursing staff. The department worked to accurately capture different elements of the nursing workflow in the EMR. These elements were used to define operational metrics such as volumes, turnaround times, pending work etc., which automatically update the dashboard in real time. Therefore, nursing leaders do not have to abstract or analyze information but have immediately accessible data that can be easily interpreted and used to drive decisions.