Development and Usability of a Dashboard for Quality Monitoring and Resident-Centered Care in Australian Residential...

The Australian National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (QI Program) requires government-subsidized residential aged care service providers to report quarterly data on a set of quality indicators. These indicators measure provider performance across specific domains of care and are intended to support continuous quality improvement. Health care dashboards can enhance the use of indicators by presenting data in interactive and intuitive formats that enable actionable insights.

This mixed methods study aimed to develop an electronic dashboard to assist service providers' use of QI Program data to measure, track, and improve the quality of resident care.

A participatory design methodology was used to co-design and co-develop the dashboard. Initially, stakeholder participants for the co-design were identified. A combination of workshops, meetings, and email communications with co-design participants was then used to iteratively define and refine user requirements and to develop and improve the dashboard prototype. A 3-month pilot of the dashboard was conducted with a convenience sample of 30 end-users across 12 nursing homes and a post-pilot survey based on the System Usability Scale (SUS) was used to assess end-users' perceptions of the dashboard usability.

The dashboard supports multiple user roles by enabling comparisons across homes and detailed views of all indicators for individual homes. A key feature is the ability to progressively view data at various levels of detail: groups of homes, individual homes, resident groups, and individual residents. The resident-level view enables more targeted, personalized care by helping staff identify and prioritize the specific indicators triggered by each resident. The average SUS score was 75.2 (SD 16.3), indicating good usability for the dashboard. Most survey respondents (12/14, 85.7%) were likely or extremely likely to recommend the dashboard to a colleague and agreed the dashboard would support the delivery of personalized care for residents. Almost all respondents (13/14) agreed or strongly agreed that the dashboard would assist with quality monitoring and improvement activities, and some pilot participants also made suggestions for incorporating the dashboard into those activities.

This study demonstrates the potential value of a co-designed dashboard to support the use of quality indicator data in residential aged care. Limitations of the current prototype include short pilot duration, convenience sampling, and reliance on manual quarterly data uploads, which constrain generalizability and scalability. Future work should explore long-term integration of the dashboard into routine quality improvement processes and evaluate its impact on resident outcomes and care quality over time.