Design of a Management Dashboard for the Intensive Care Unit: Determining Key Performance Indicators and their Required Capabilities

Introduction: Because the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) provides vital services to save the lives of critically ill patients, this unit has a special standing in health care systems; therefore it must be able to continuously monitor the quality of service and cost-effectiveness. The use of management dashboards can be helpful in real-time demonstration of essential information, problem recognition and performance improvement of the ICU. Therefore, this study aims to determine the key performance indicators for designing the management dashboard of an intensive care unit and identifying the required capabilities. Material and Methods: A total of 85 critical care experts participated in a two-round Delphi survey. An electronic questionnaire was utilized to gather data which include 50 Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) arranged in 3 main categories (structure, process and outcome). The relative importance of the KPIs and dashboard capabilities was determined using a five-point Likert scale. Results: The results of the study showed that a total of 28 indicators (13 KPIs in processes, 12 KPIs in output and 3 KPIs in structure) were identified. Also, the most important required capabilities of the dashboard for the intensive care unit included: simple graphic format, suitable chart, table and color, fit for a single screen, highlighted key point criteria, and user friendliness. Conclusions: In this study, ICU experts agreed on a set of 28 measurable KPIs for monitoring ICU performance. These sets of KPIs may be useful to assess performance appropriately in ICU departments of countries like Iran that do not have proper clinical information systems in hospitals. Also they suggest capabilities to effectively design ICU dashboards that could be used for all types of dashboards.