When representatives from Admitting and the Emergency and Medicine departments sat down in 2011 to share data, nobody quite understood what the others were trying to convey. Pages of data reports from one team member meant nothing to the others. Today, however, these same individuals can quickly gauge each department’s situation without uttering a word.

The difference is the Patient Throughput Dashboard, a Web-based display of real-time data across the Medicine and Emergency departments. It includes patient volume in the departments and bed availability. Hetal Rupani, medicine analytics manager, says Tableau (see, “3 Tools for Data Visualization”) was used to create at-a-glance visualizations from data streams across the department.

Now, department team members can see color-coded bar charts, line graphs and number tickers that quickly communicate the number of people waiting, the number and type of beds in use or being cleaned, and much more.

To demonstrate the tool’s effectiveness, in fiscal year 2014, the time patients waited in the Emergency Department after being admitted to the hospital decreased by more than 50 percent.

In just two years, Rupani says the dashboard has improved communication and operational efficiency, which in turn impact patient care. “We can see the whole picture so we can keep patients moving,” she says. “It affects how we function and talk to each other. It’s caused a real culture change in the department.”

Six floors in the newly renovated Nelson/Harvey Building will have screens showing dashboards—one tailored for that unit and one for overall medicine—at all nursing stations. A similar dashboard was recently implemented for the entire hospital, and additional dashboards are in the works for departments like Surgery, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.