Electronic Health Record Serious Illness Conversation Dashboards: An Implementation Case Series

Introduction: Dashboards are used to track and visualize quality indicators within health systems to improve clinical performance. Structured serious illness conversation (SIC) documentation templates within electronic health records (EHR) have enabled the development of SIC dashboards for quality improvement. Little is known about the successes and challenges of SIC dashboards.

Methods: This implementation case series describes findings from semi-structured interviews and surveys with nine palliative care leaders in eight health systems that implemented SIC dashboards. Interviews and case information were analyzed to identify themes.

Results: Five themes were identified. First, dashboards focus on process metrics. By creating transparent and efficient access to data on EHR-documented SICs, dashboards facilitated monitoring of the results of clinician training and quality improvement efforts. Second, palliative care leaders used dashboard data on documented SICs to implement clinician practice change strategies (e.g. data feedback; quality incentives), but clinicians had mixed reactions to data. Third, dashboards facilitated leadership investment in SIC efforts and required financial and technical resources to build and maintain. Fourth, while dashboards streamlined data collection for implementation teams, participants noted challenges with data reliability, including inadequate clinician use of structured SIC documentation templates (which most dashboards rely on for measurement). Fifth, needs and tensions arose with integrating patient-centered outcome measures as part of dashboards.

Conclusion: Dashboards can be powerful tools for identifying gaps in SIC and driving interventions for clinician practice change. However, challenges related to clinician adoption of structured templates for SIC documentation and mixed clinician receptivity to data feedback may limit their reliability and use.