Dashboards to Support Academic Practices

The robust amount of data in the electronic health record is revolutionizing the practice of medicine. These advances provide the necessary data and tools to support population health initiatives with the goal to improve care for patients. The foundation of population health management systems rests upon registries, or databases, of specific clinical conditions. These registries organize the data in a manner that can be presented in dashboards to support clinical and operational activities in faculty and resident practices. Dashboards, in turn, provide a population-based view of the health of the patients based on predefined clinical quality measures (CQMs). Most importantly, dashboards allow the ability to pull gaps in care to support outreach to patients and support quality improvement initiatives. In addition, dashboards offer the opportunity to present the necessary data to support the educational, operational, and financial activities of managing an academic medical practice.