Nursing KPI dashboard

Modern organizations across many industries rely on sophisticated reporting strategies to help analyze and improve their business performance. Medical facilities included, tracking and utilizing data gleaned through Key Performance Indicators can generate invaluable insight into your company’s daily functions.

Most patient-facing healthcare facilities – clinics, hospitals, residential facilities, and more – are busy places. Setting up a KPI dashboard for your Nursing staff can help to make this critical information more accessible, actionable, and beneficial to your business.

What are Nursing KPIs?

Healthcare organizations can set broad KPIs to track performance across the facility, as well as designate indicators within specific departments or areas of the company. Nurses have a significant impact on patient experience and medical outcomes in most healthcare settings, often defining the success of the organization through their work. Nursing KPIs can be used to reveal critical areas of achievement, or opportunities for improvement.

Nursing KPIs are performance indicators set against operating standards within the Nursing department. These track a number of fundamental metrics which either impact or are impacted directly by your organization’s Nurses. Which Nursing KPIs you choose to track may depend on the type of healthcare facility you run, as well as the goals you hope to achieve.

Examples of Nursing KPIs

Nursing KPIs can relate to patient outcomes, staffing standards, equipment usage, and more. Here are a few examples of Nursing KPIs that apply in most healthcare settings.

• Nurse-to-patient ratio. Patient outcomes are improved by a lower number of patients per Nurse. Tracking your Nurse-to-patient ratio can help you to understand and improve certain trends in patient care and trajectory.
• Patient turnover rate. This measures how quickly patients move through your healthcare facility, whether a clinic or hospital. Information generated from this metric indicates the length of time it takes for patients to receive adequate therapeutic care. This KPI can be tracked on an average, or by ailment, as different injuries and illnesses may have different turnover rate expectations.
• Patient follow-up rate. Patient readmission declines when Nurses and other allied healthcare professionals check in with the patient following active care. Patient follow-up rates are easily tracked on a KPI dashboard as Nurses reach out to former patients to collect status reports.
• Annual Nurse training time. Nurses are required to complete some amount of continuing education over the course of their careers, and this can be supplemented by continuous employer-sponsored learning. Nurse training KPIs can help to drive better learning programs that equip your Nursing staff with updated skill sets for better patient care.
• Mistake events. This KPI tracks the number and nature of errors made during various stages of patient care. Ideally this number will be zero, but an increase in mistake events can be a symptom of larger problems such as lack of training or Nurse burnout. This metric is critical to track, and quickly address.

How to measure Nursing KPIs

Different Nursing KPIs require different measuring techniques. For example, tracking your Nurse-to-patient ratio is a matter of generating staffing reports over specified time periods, where in-patient experiences will rely on anecdotal reviews from the patients themselves.

An intelligent ERP can help you to track stats-driven metrics including patient follow-up and training time. Integrated software can track and log this information when a digital training module is completed, or a patient is successfully contacted. 

You can also design patient experience surveys to be compatible with broader data-gathering software. Modern ERPs enable communications abilities which easily log information from patient interviews.

Post-care patient surveys should ask individuals to rate their care team on a number of critical points, including:

• Bedside manner.
• Wait time.
• Communication.
• Quality of explanation of medical concepts.
• Explanation of after-care and patient responsibilities.

These ratings will generate easy-to-understand numbers which can be factored into an overall performance indicator for individual Nurses or Nursing teams. You may also invite the patient to add additional thoughts or written commentary which may provide critical context to their survey responses.

What should go on your Nursing KPI dashboard

The contents of your Nursing KPI dashboard will be determined by the goals you set, and the KPIs you need to track to reach those goals.

Example: Your facility may set an objective to maintain a 1:5 Nurse-to-patient ratio at all times during operating hours. Your dashboard may then feature a KPI display demonstrating the current number of patients against the Nurses’ working schedule.

Example: Your facility may want to reduce patient readmission rates through better Nurse follow-up. Your dashboard may then feature a KPI display indicating the rate of follow-up calls made by Nurses, as well as how long following patient release the call was made. You can then compare this number to the actual readmission rate of these same patients.

Example: Your facility may want to improve patient outcomes via better ongoing training for Nurses. Your dashboard may then feature a KPI display indicating digital training completion rates including time to completion, number of units completed, and the proportion of Nursing staff participating in the training.

These numbers can help you to correlate improved patient outcomes with Nurse training, or identify potential pitfalls which may be inhibiting your educational programs.

Your Nursing KPI dashboard should include only displays of what you need to understand to reach your goals and improve organizational statistics. Avoid overloading your dashboard with extraneous information. Or, if you want to keep an eye on everything, help to give it context by creating dashboards for individual departments or facility areas.

CrossChq can help

Quality of Hire is one Nursing KPI that is absolutely critical to track after onboarding new Nursing staff. As a performance metric, quality of hire gives you insight into the return on your investment into a new hire, including details like individual performance, time to readiness, and more. Tracking this all-important KPI allows you better perspective on your Nurse recruitment process, allowing you to adjust where needed and make better hiring decisions in the future.

CrossChq is a comprehensive talent management solution that helps leading healthcare companies recruit, hire, and retain top talent in their field. With CrossChq, the Quality of Hire and other Nursing KPIs are made into reliable, actionable business metrics, giving you the insight you need to accelerate towards your organizational goals.

Learn what else CrossChq has to offer: Request a demo today.