A Proposed Dashboard for Pediatric Hospital Medicine Groups

In February of 2009, the Society of Hospital Medicine, the Section on Hospital Medicine of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Academic Pediatric Association sponsored a strategic planning meeting to create a vision of the future for Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM). One of the outcomes of that meeting was a mandate to create a dashboard for PHM groups. Given that PHM is the fastest growing area of pediatrics,1 and that pediatric hospitalists and their groups are becoming responsible for more patients and more processes in hospitals,2 an important part of the growth of the specialty will be continuous improvement and monitoring. As with all areas of medicine, improvement comes from identification of gaps in performance or services and the subsequent improvement cycles that follow. This proposed dashboard attempts to build a framework for groups to monitor, compare, and improve performance. In addition to groups monitoring their own performance over time, it is envisioned that, as groups begin to populate this dashboard, there will be a transparent repository for the dashboards that allow for comparison among similar groups. In July 2009, a call for participation in the creation of the dashboard was sent to the PHM Listserv of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In addition to the 3 original hospitalists named to start the project (P.H., J.D., E.R.), 8 others volunteered to form the PHM Dashboard Committee (the Committee).The Committee met numerous times via conference call and agreed to the following guiding principles: 1. The dashboard should be as broadly applicable as possible 2. The dashboard should focus on the PHM group, and not the individual hospitalist 3. The dashboard should use the simplest possible methods for achieving measurement aims 4. Dashboard items should be selected and/or customized to best help each unique PHM group: each group’s dashboard may look different Subsequently, …