Development and usability of a dashboard for quality monitoring and resident-centred care in Australian residential long-term care: A mixed-methods study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The Australian National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (QI Program) requires government-subsidised residential aged care service providers to report quarterly data on a set of quality indicators. These indicators measure provider performance across specific domains of care and are intended to support continuous quality improvement. Healthcare dashboards can enhance the use of indicators by presenting data in interactive and intuitive formats that enable actionable insights. OBJECTIVE This mixed-methods study aimed to develop an electronic dashboard to assist service providers’ use of QI Program data to measure, track, and improve the quality of resident care. METHODS A participatory design methodology was used to codesign and codevelop the dashboard. Initially, stakeholder participants for the codesign were identified. A combination of workshops, meetings, and email communications with codesign participants was then used to iteratively define and refine user requirements, and to develop and improve the dashboard prototype. A 3-month pilot of the dashboard was conducted with a convenience sample of 30 end-users and a post-pilot survey based on the system usability scale (SUS) was used to assess end-users’ perceptions of the dashboard usability. RESULTS The dashboard supports multiple user roles by enabling comparisons across homes, and detailed views of all indicators for a selected home. A key feature is the ability to progressively view data at various levels of granularity¬¬—groups of homes, individual homes, resident groups, and individual residents. The resident-level view enables more targeted, person-centred care by helping staff identify and prioritise the specific indicators triggered by each resident. The average SUS score was 75.2 (SD = 16.3), indicating good usability for the dashboard. Most survey respondents (85.7%) were likely or extremely likely to recommend the dashboard to a colleague and agreed the dashboard would support the delivery of personalised care for residents. Almost all respondents (13 of 14) agreed or strongly agreed that the dashboard would assist with quality monitoring and improvement activities and some pilot participants also made suggestions for incorporating the dashboard into those activities. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates the value of a participatory design approach in developing a user-centred electronic dashboard to support the use of Australian QI Program in residential aged care. The dashboard was found to be highly usable and well-received by end-users, with strong potential to enhance quality monitoring, support personalised care, and drive continuous improvement across aged care services. Future work should explore long-term integration of the dashboard into routine quality improvement processes and evaluate its impact on resident outcomes and care quality over time.