Inpatient Staffing Dashboard: A Nursing-Information Technology Collaborative Project

Inadequate staffing negatively impacts hospital operations, quality of patient care, and employee engagement. Traditional staffing approaches to address clinical staffing and scheduling are not as effective in a complex healthcare environment. Organizations must leverage innovative strategies and use of technology to improve clinical staffing. To address the staffing challenges, nursing staffing and information technology at Loma Linda University Medical Center developed an inpatient staffing dashboard. A staffing dashboard is a staffing tool comprised of several tabs and staffing measures, which include filled percentage as the key performance indicator. During the staffing dashboard development, evaluation took place to determine the staffing and scheduling system's extract-transform-load capacity. Data were analyzed, defined, and profiled. Tableau software was used to create an interactive staffing dashboard and integrated with EPIC Hyperspace for user accessibility. The interactive features and staffing measures available in this staffing tool empowered staffing and nursing leaders to utilize data visualization for day-to-day nursing operations, proactively plan for staffing demands, and use data to drive staffing decisions. Our collaborative experience proved that nursing and information technology collaborative projects produce innovative solutions and workflow efficiencies. Leaders must promote nursing-information technology collaborations in healthcare organizations.