Aims
Healthcare dashboards visualise patient-level and aggregate data, to guide decision-making, evaluate outcomes and reveal unwarranted variations in care. We have successfully demonstrated the technical feasibility of extracting and visualising near real-time evidence-based nutrition care data comprising nutritional status and involuntary weight loss in dynamic, automated dashboards. Next, we aimed to explore the interaction of nutrition care metrics with medical and supportive care within the context of outcome variation, including visualisation throughout the care trajectory.
Methods
The SPHERE Cancer Variation (CaVa) platform extracts and harmonises data from South Western Sydney Local Health District clinical information systems, including key named entities from free text clinical notes using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Novel harmonised clinical nutrition data were evaluated for quality, completeness, generalisability and alignment with patient outcomes and quality metrics against other prognostic factors including diagnostic and treatment episodes, dietetic resource utilisation and best-practice nutrition care in near real-time.
Results
Nutrition care dashboards comprising multiple data visualisations were deployed within the CaVa modular dashboard framework. Technical and functional feasibility at both aggregate and individual patient levels was demonstrated, in anticipation of supporting use cases covering daily clinical use, periodic clinical quality reviews and health service-level monitoring. This dashboard framework has now been successfully extended, with components reused across high nutrition-risk groups, confirming suitability for sustainable live deployment. Prototype dashboards created to assess utility of this framework for the nutrition care of patients with head and neck, lung or upper gastrointestinal cancers will be presented.
Conclusion
We have established a repeatable dashboard framework that can be co-designed and adapted for multiple contexts. This pilot has demonstrated timely visualisation of evidence-based nutrition care processes and prognostic nutrition outcomes is feasible. Adoption of automated nutrition care dashboards in routine care holds potential to inform decision-making and improve patient care and outcomes.