Most executive dashboards fail in one of two ways. They show so many numbers that nobody knows where to look, or they show numbers nobody trusts, so every meeting starts with an argument about the data. A good leadership dashboard is the opposite: short, consistent and credible.
This post offers principles for choosing and laying out the metrics that senior-living and healthcare leaders actually use to run the business.
Before picking a metric, ask what decision it will inform. If nobody can name an action that changes when the number moves, leave it off. A dashboard for an administrator or executive team should answer a few questions:
Are we full, and is it moving the right way?
Are we staffed safely and affordably?
Are we delivering good and safe care?
Are we getting paid?
Is anything at risk right now?
Those five questions map naturally to a handful of numbers.
There is nothing magic about seven. It is a useful limit that forces choices. Here is a sample set for a skilled nursing or senior-living operator. Swap in what fits your business.
Census or occupancy, compared to budget or last month.
Admissions and discharges, or pending inquiries and tours for a senior-living community.
Staffing hours per resident day, or an agency use figure, depending on what you track.
A quality or safety indicator, such as falls, pressure injuries or infections, chosen by clinical leadership.
Days in accounts receivable, or another billing health measure.
Overtime or labor cost against budget.
A risk or compliance item, such as open survey findings, overdue training or unresolved security issues.
Another organization may choose resident or family satisfaction, turnover, or incident counts. What matters is that leaders agree on the list and keep it stable.
Disputes usually come from definitions. Write down for each number:
How it is calculated, including what is included and excluded
Which system is the source
Who owns it and is accountable for its accuracy
How often it is refreshed
Put those definitions where people can find them, such as a hover note or a one-page companion sheet.
Readers scan from the top left. Place the number that matters most there, and let the others follow in order of importance.
A number alone says little. Pair it with a comparison, such as the target, the prior period or a simple trend line. Use color sparingly, and make sure red and green are not the only way to show status, since many people have difficulty distinguishing them.
If someone must scroll or click to understand the situation, the design is doing too much. Put detail on drill-down pages for managers, and keep the executive view clean.
A single large number with a small trend line suits "where are we now?"
A bar or line chart over time suits "is it improving?"
A comparison across buildings suits "who needs help?"
Avoid decorative graphics, three-dimensional charts and anything that makes the number harder to read.
A beautiful dashboard with bad data is worse than none. Practices that help:
Pull data automatically from the system of record rather than retyping it.
Show a "last updated" date on the screen.
Reconcile the dashboard with a known source, such as your financial statements or census report, each month.
Assign someone to investigate when a number looks wrong, and fix the cause upstream.
Protect access, since a dashboard can contain sensitive operational information and sometimes resident data.
Revisit the dashboard each quarter. Drop numbers no one acts on, and add one only if you remove one. Ask leaders which number they looked at last and which they ignored.
Begin on paper. Sketch the seven numbers, agree on definitions and then build it in whatever tool your team can maintain. UnityCare IT helps healthcare operators connect data from clinical, scheduling and billing systems into a single reporting view, with the access controls those sources require.
An outsourced IT department with proactive maintenance and one number to call.
Call or text: 405-285-3845
New customers: start@unitycareit.com
Existing customers: support@unitycareit.com
Address: UnityCare Technologies, 2524 N Broadway Ste 554, PMB 947974, Edmond, Oklahoma 73034-4172