Intensive Care Unit direct dashboard reporting via WebEOC

Over the last week ICU clinical directors and their staff from around the country have been getting used to providing direct local figures for their facility into the DHB Dashboard.

The data fields were developed by an ICU Advisory group representing intensivists and ICU nursing staff from around the country as well as the Ministry. Colin McArthur, Clinical Director from Auckland Department of Critical Care Medicine and the Operations Team in the National Health Coordination Centre were instrumental in supporting the development of this board and persuading users that we could do better than trying to manage 25 excel spreadsheets returned daily.

The ICU dashboard was built as an additional table within the existing DHB Dashboard. This allows a DHB to add as many ICU facilities as they have and then edit and update the records for those ICUs. The previous ICU data that the DHB Emergency Operations Centre had been entering around patients with confirmed H1N1 is now automatically populated via a related list function from the ICU data.

For a DHB with more that one ICU the numbers for each respective category are automatically summed and provided as a return for the DHB. As you can see below the ICU details appear as a nested table within the DHB detail display.

In this case it is Auckland DHB which has a Paediatric ICU (Starship) as well as Cardio Vascular and Department of Critical Care Medicine ICUs. These three ICUs all provide summed figures to the main DHB board.

There is also a display view linked off the main the DHB Dashboard that provides a consolidated view of all of the ICU units. This type of functionality is incredibly useful and the print to PDF button allows a snapshot view to be rapidly disseminated and shared.

It has also been an opportunity to start using some of the built-in reporter functionality of the system, and for the non WebEOC Admins out there this basically allows the admins to build a database query and store it on the control panel as a weblink. Clicking the link will open another window and return the pre-canned report which can then been exported to excel and sliced and diced as required. This is a whole level of functionality we have not really utilised so far but allows historical reports and trends over time to be easily viewed.

For example: Want to see how the incident details board has changed over time? - simply run a report and it will show what time and what user changed any of the specified fields. Of course there are a few limitations, because it is returning raw data fields you need to know what the data fields you are interested in were called and sometimes what was clearly labelled to the developer might not be clear to someone looking at the report later.