Medication dashboard’s basic structure can be replicated, customized

The dashboard developed by Penn-Presbyterian Medical Center (PPMC) in Philadelphia draws on a range of data sources unique to the health system’s IT structure and environment. However, the basic structure of the dashboard can be replicated and customized to fit any other organization’s needs, capabilities and data sources. Here is a link to an Excel template that can provide a basis for developing such a dashboard:

Excel template

The idea of building an anesthesia dashboard came about when the Medication Value Committee at PPMC became aware of the sheer number of purchases to be investigated and data to be sifted through. When initiating their data review, the PPMC Medication Value Committee focused primarily on the medical center’s purchasing patterns as a good proxy for utilization.

The goal was to keep it simple, using Excel to group and trend the extracts from PPMC’s purchasing system and publish the monthly results in the dashboard, which would be the focus of the committee’s review.

Although the committee initially relied on the National Data Code associated with the drugs for review, committee members quickly realized that a higher level of grouping was needed. The AHFS [American Hospital Formulary Service] Pharmacologic-Therapeutic Classification allowed purchases to be categorized in a more meaningful way.

The committee met to review how the data was grouped to make sense of purchase patterns, bulk purchases, shortage purchases and substitutions used.

A key component of the dashboard was marking the time frames associated with intervention periods and trending the impact. As the committee began asking more questions of the data, they developed tables and formulas for further refining the views. The dashboard remains a continuous work in process.