Remember when a “dashboard” referred to the display just behind a car’s steering wheel? In today’s digital universe, the word has come to mean any number of visual information displays. At the same time, the meaning of the word “value” has narrowed somewhat. In relation to health care, “value” is defined quite precisely as the quality of patient outcomes per dollar spent on healthcare services.
In the November 4, 2020 issue of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Reilly et al. explain how they created a “value dashboard” for total hip and knee arthroplasty (THA and TKA) at a tertiary-care medical center in New England. The goal: track and display the surgeon-level cost and quality of these procedures against institutional benchmarks to identify opportunities for improving value.
The 7 quality metrics that Reilly et al. used included both clinical and patient-reported outcomes, weighted by surgeons using a modified Delphi process. Average direct costs per surgeon were calculated from the medical center’s billing system, and data were collected over a 15-month period from 2017 to 2018 to ensure at least 1 year of outcomes. Six surgeons were included in the TKA value dashboard, and 5 were included in the THA dashboard.
Relative to the institutional benchmarks:
- Value for TKA by surgeon ranged from 7% below benchmark to 12% above.
- Value for THA by surgeon ranged from 12% below benchmark to 7% above.
The dashboard itself (see Figure above) displays quality, cost, and overall value so viewers can see at a glance which metrics are driving the value score for each surgeon, whose procedural volume is also depicted. The authors cite as one limitation of this study the fact that the quality metrics were weighted by local surgeons only, and they say that “ideally the weighting would be informed by a panel of national experts and several stakeholder groups,… including patients.”
