Dental Quality Analytics: Dental Measures and Provider Performance Dashboard

Objectives: Besides the availability of well-defined quality improvement measures to drive the culture of quality in dentistry, there is also a strong need for visual analytical platform and tools to view and learn about practice and individual provider performances in real-time. This initiative focused on developing a dental quality analytics interactive dashboard to view the clinical data documented via Electronic Health Records at a large dental practice in Wisconsin.
Methods: The data to support the development of nine quality improvement measures was abstracted from the Marshfield Clinic Enterprise Data Warehouse into a SQL Server database employing the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube design. The user interface was designed using ASP.NET MVC framework along with C3-JS charting library.
Results: The application consisted of four sections – ‘Summary’, ‘Measures’, ‘Trends’ and ‘Comparison’. The ‘Summary’ section displayed the distributions of the patient population in terms of comorbidities, age-gender, tobacco consumption and body mass index (BMI). Data in ‘Measures’ section was broadly classified into preventive procedures, patient recall, treatment planned and dental caries prevalence. Both sections filtered data by three parameters: center/provider, billing type and reporting period. Performance of each center/provider was gauged by assigning benchmarks to each of the dental measures. The ‘Trends’ and ‘Comparison’ sections displayed a monthly progression of the data in the ‘Measures’ section. The purpose of these sections was to compare centers and providers to each other based on specific measures over a user-defined time-period.
Conclusions: The development of this interactive dashboard informed the users about the performance of the system as a whole, individual centers and individual providers under the nine measures that were implemented. The development of benchmarks and access to current individual performance, serves as a feedback loop for the providers to focus on the selected quality improvement measures.