Medsphere, a leading commercial provider of open source-based electronic health record systems and services for hospitals and clinics, has a strong focus on project management.  Program managers are responsible for presenting the overall progress on the company’s projects to their different stakeholders, including board members and customers.  However, they did not have a succinct and comprehensive way of communicating the myriad of details to their various stakeholders until they adopted dashboards. 

Using the full dashboard technology of an EIS, they can now convey information across the organization regarding each customer’s implementation. Two basic dashboards were implemented:

•  The Project Performance Dashboard helps Medsphere managers, executives and board members quickly obtain an understanding of the progress of customer implementations. For example, they can see at a glance budget and schedule performance that can be used to forecast future performance.

•  The Project Status Dashboard helps Medsphere managers, executives and board members quickly obtain information on project challenges including burn off and aging status.

Of course individual decision makers can customize their dashboard with a variety of measures, including scheduling, actual vs. planned, issues, top 5 challenges, risk management, and earned value management dashboards. 

Managers at Medsphere note the dashboards have improved communications among employees because they can see and understand the relevant information at the same time.  In addition, because they can drill down into the data to find the reason for a particular outcome, it allows decision makers to understand the reason for a result and the items that might be adjusted to improve it.