Data Storyteller

Do you play a key role in gathering, analyzing, and visualizing data at your health center? This HITEQ webinar taught about how to use our Health Center Dashboard Design Guide, a comprehensive guide to user-centered dashboard design for health center staff. Using this guide, you and your team can develop dashboards that enable data exploration and use by making more informed design decisions, moving beyond the defaults.

This webinar series was hosted to support various roles who work with data in health centers to provide best practices and promote equity through data collection and analysis. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how to meaningfully use data to improve their health center.

Having rapid access to data in health centers is critical to managing clinics, using operational data to improve care, and reporting quality measures. Quality, accessible data in health care can do more than feature in reports and accountability systems: effective communication of information can improve quality of care, alignment to evidence-based care principles, and data-informed decision making. Charts, graphs, maps, and other data visualizations play a key role in making information accessible. Visualizations make the patterns in large datasets rapidly apparent, showing when numbers are going up or down, performance compared to goals, comparison between patient groups, and more. The purpose of this resource is to provide a comprehensive guide to user-centered dashboard design for health center staff.

Value-based care focuses on improving patient outcomes while optimizing total cost of care. For health centers seeking to improve their internal processes for value-based care, effective data visualization can play a significant role in understanding, monitoring, and promoting value-based care practices. This resource details how data visualization can be employed to support value-based care and includes suggestions on how to depict measures and trends using data dashboards.

As health centers work towards providing more patient-centered and equitable care, they are increasingly adopting standardized social needs screening tools, such as PRAPARE and others, to systematically identify the challenges patients face in managing and improving their health, such as food and housing insecurity, transportation barriers, or safety concerns.  This information can be used to make impactful care planning and programmatic changes that lead to improvements in health outcomes, resource utilization, and reimbursement.  Data dashboards help analyze social determinants of health information in visual displays that deepen insights and trigger action towards addressing patient’s social needs, improving population health, and reducing inequities in care.

This webinar provided a foundational overview of social determinants of health dashboard design and presents case studies from health centers leading the way on use of social determinants of health data dashboards to build community partnerships, improve linkages to services outside the four walls of the clinic, and demonstrate the value-based impact of social needs services in improving the health, well-being, and quality of life of communities served.  One health center shared their experience building dashboards and using them in their clinic.