A community mental health organization’s use of decision support dashboards for indicator monitoring: Development and early implementation

This paper describes a community mental health organization’s development and implementation of a performance monitoring system through the development of decision support dashboards as a tracking and visualization tool, adopting a developmental evaluation approach. Damschroder’s Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) was used as an implementation science framework to guide the work. The project was initiated as part of an organizational priority to improve the collection and use of client data. The development of the dashboards was based on organization-wide consultation. We describe the steps taken to develop the dashboards, key changes made based on monitoring needs, as well as challenges, facilitators, and lessons learned. Overall, the organization found that dashboards could be introduced for monitoring and decision support in several ways. The organization reached early implementation of the dashboards at the time of this paper and will continue to implement the dashboards collaboratively and iteratively, to ensure long-term relevance and sustained use towards improving client outcomes.