Launch of Web Tool Dashboard
The NELA Project Team is committed to constantly improving the way in which the audit is being conducted and ensuring that it is truly a two-way project, with valuable information being fed back to sites based on the patient data you are working hard to provide us with. In response to participant feedback and after many months of planning and design, it is with great pleasure that we are able to announce the launch of the NELA Online Web Tool Dashboard. The Dashboard is the latest addition to the NELA web tool and should now be available for all of you to view under the new 'Reports' tab.
What is the Dashboard?
The Dashboard uses the web tool patient data from cases which you've submitted to the audit and reports it back to you in ways that can be easily viewed and evaluated. From early on in the Patient Audit we have been urging local participants to take advantage of the web tool's Export function so as to begin analysing patient data. While we still feel the Export function is an invaluable asset for sites to use, we understand that analysing the data on Excel can be time consuming. The aim of the Dashboard is to begin simplifying this process.
The first phase of the Dashboard which has now been launched focuses on Case Ascertainment and Patient Demographics. The Patient Demographics section allows you to view some basic information on your hospital's population of patients undergoing emergency laparotomy, and how it compares to the audit-wide average. It focuses on characteristics such as patient age and operative urgency.
The Case Ascertainment side is a tool we're very much hoping will help in the process of getting cases completed and locked. It gives you a detailed list of all incomplete cases, along with each case's date of admission, completion percentage and highlights the individuals who are responsible for completing it. It also allows you to see during which months the most amount of cases were entered, thus giving you the opportunity to see how you're doing in the data collection process now compared to previous months.
The next phase of the Dashboard will focus much more heavily on Quality Improvement, feeding back key QI indicators and comparing your hospital's data with national audit-wide averages. We are currently in the process of developing the QI dashboard and hope to make further additions for you to use in the lead up to the release of the first NELA Patient Report in July 2015.
A detailed user guide outlining how the Dashboard can be accessed and ways in which it can be used to display and analyse data can be found here.
