Hospital BI
Hospital dashboard: how it works and what it should show
A good hospital dashboard answers one question per screen, shows the variance and lets you drill down to the cause. Everything else is decoration.
A hospital dashboard is a screen that brings together the KPIs for one area of hospital management (billing, costs, volume, cash) with filters and charts, refreshed from the information system's data. It works in three layers: the data read from the system, the rules that turn that data into indicators and the screen that displays them and lets you navigate.
How a hospital dashboard works
- Reading: data comes from the hospital information system (Tasy, in Clic Health's case) at set times.
- Rules: each indicator has a single definition. "Revenue", for example, must say whether it is by accrual period or billing date, whether it includes SUS, whether denials are deducted.
- Screen: the dashboard shows the indicators, the variance against a reference (last month, last year, budget) and the filters.
- Navigation: one click drills from the total to the detail, for example from hospital revenue to payer, specialty and encounter.
What the board should see first
The board's first screen must answer, in a few seconds, whether the month is good or bad and why. In practice:
- Few indicators, the ones that change decisions: revenue, contribution margin, EBITDA, net result, denial rate, unbilled accounts, average collection period, occupancy.
- Always with a reference: a number on its own says nothing. "R$ 29 million, 5.9% above last year" does.
- Where the problem is: a chart showing where revenue fell or cost rose, by area.
- The update time in plain sight, so no one decides on a stale number.
Clic Health's ADM Command Center follows this design. The most common indicators are listed in hospital KPIs.
One dashboard per audience
| Audience | What they need to see |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Result, EBITDA, cash generation, debt and risks against targets |
| Executive board | Revenue, margin, result, denials, unbilled accounts, volume |
| Controllership | Budget vs. actual income statement, variance by cost center, costs by department |
| Billing | Unbilled accounts, time accounts stay open, denials, write-offs |
| Medical board | Volume, surgeries by specialty, average length of stay |
In Clic Health, the hospital administrator builds a BI for each team from the existing dashboards and decides who sees each one.
Mistakes that get a dashboard abandoned
- Numbers that differ from accounting: the first discrepancy destroys trust. The rules must be the same as the income statement's.
- Crowded screens: twenty charts on one page hide what matters.
- No update time: managers cannot tell whether today's number is reliable.
- No way to reach the cause: if the dashboard shows margin fell but not where, analysis goes back to the spreadsheet.
- No export: analysts need to take the data to Excel for specific analyses.
A real-time dashboard?
"Real time" is rarely necessary in management. What the board needs is data refreshed on a known schedule: several times a day for billing, daily for volume, after month-end close for accounting. More important than speed is knowing the time of the last update.