The disparate and disjointed data silos across various hospital departments constitute the biggest decision-making bottleneck. They impede the gathering of real-time, actionable information about the hospital's performance with regard to clinical, operational and financial key performance indicators (KPIs). Most hospitals have business intelligence (BI) systems which provide post facto analysis and miss out on the real-time aspect. In such situations, the hospital's executives depends on more than one system to get any actionable data and is thus stymied in taking effective, problem solving steps.
Dashboards generated by the BI systems and used by hospital administrators need to gather data on KPIs from varied sources in the facility and present a holistic view. With such data aggregation, a COO can obtain a real-time, 360-degree snapshot of the hospital's performance and make proactive decisions. At the same time, a dashboard must drill down into each of the KPI details to identify and eliminate the root causes for poor performance. In this paper we present our point of view on crucial hospital KPIs, how a dashboard can accelerate the speed and quality of decision-making and how it must present information.