Clinician-Designed Dashboards

Abstract

Critical care pharmacists play a crucial role in direct and indirect patient-care and professional service. Despite this, there is still an ongoing discussion on how to justify their role in the ICU and encourage the opening of more positions. A clinician-designed dashboard is an example of how to present relevant metrics to stakeholders. An example dashboard could include metrics such as pharmacist-to-patient ratio, number of interventions, and stewardship efforts. A dashboard could also convey contributions a critical care pharmacist makes outside of the ICU. This includes institutional services such as education and research. The measurement of such outcomes would justify new positions and protect current critical care pharmacists from unsustainable workloads by recognizing domains of value brought on by a pharmacist. The development of such a dashboard would be a step towards improving outcomes via interprofessional culture and patient-centered care.

Keywords: clinical services; critical care; residency training/programs; staff development.

Figure 1.

The example clinician designed-dashboard highlights metrics relevant to the stakeholder triad (the patient, the healthcare professional, and the institution). The idea is that the dashboard creates a broader picture of what the critical care pharmacist contributes to the stakeholders than a single metric alone. The dashboard also conveys the different domains that a pharmacist plays a key role in, such as direct and indirect patient care, education, and professional development.