HMC Launches Digital Dashboards

HMC Digital Dashboards is a tool designed to simplify the consolidation and display of hospital performance improvement results, simply and flexibly pulling information from any hospital person or IT system.

(PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- The Healthcare Management Council, Inc. (HMC), a non-traditional acute care hospital-benchmarking firm in Needham, MA, announces today yet another addition to its Performance Management product line, Digital Dashboards. Like other dashboard offerings, Digital Dashboards is a tool designed to simplify the consolidation and display of hospital performance improvement results. But unlike others, iDashboards can pull information from any person or IT system simply and flexibly. The design is unique in that it simplifies the collection of mission-critical process results through the use of email invitations as well as IT system linkages. Results from process participants are not only summarized like other systems, but root cause explanations of problems are easily attached.

Digital Dashboards is part of a suite of HMC tools to simplify the generation of ideas (Idea Trees™), creation of action plans (Action Plan Developer™) and the measurement and communication of results (Trackers™ and the Digital Dashboards) all from a simple integrated internet portal. Both department managers and hospital executives use these tools to monitor action plans that focus on key strategic initiatives. Together they give a hospital a more complete view of current performance improvement efforts, and where performance is headed.

Partners of HMC share acute hospital general ledger and clinical data. Then HMC codes the data to specific pre-defined functional areas to compare costs to the same costs at other hospitals. Hospitals then use the HMC suite of products to support hospital managers in the project development phase and to move managers to action that will yield measurable results.

An example of this technology is the JCAHO’s Staffing Effectiveness Initiative, where balancing quality and human resource information is critical. But it’s not enough to track indicators over time, JCAHO would like to know what’s being done about it. By integrating the indicators with action plans, performance improvement efforts like these can be organized and viewed in one location.

HMC President Tom Day says, “While the concept of a Balanced Scorecard is not new, many organizations still struggle with the data collection process. The introduction of Digital Dashboards is a continuation of our mission to make access to information ‘friction-free’. We’re addressing that head on. We’re all about the quality and timeliness of information, and the Digital Dashboards move us along that path.”

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