From Design to Accountable Impact for Data Dashboards in Health Care

Vornhagen and colleagues synthesize design practices for the development of health care dashboards and provide a timely reference for a rapidly expanding class of tools that increasingly mediate clinical decisions and quality improvement. The authors have defined 4 pillars of design with associated practices, establishing a practical approach to the thoughtful development of useful dashboards. Building on these pillars, this commentary proposes accountable dashboarding, defined as making explicit the causal chain linking data sources and governance to visualization, interpretation, action, and measurable outcomes. Dashboards could be treated as sociotechnical interventions in which upstream choices are inseparable from the user interface and downstream decision-making. Evaluation should extend beyond usability and satisfaction to include decision quality and behavioral proxies, unintended consequences, and patient-centered outcomes of dashboard-informed interventions.