Designing and implementing a digital diabetes assessment tool and dashboard for use in specialist outpatient clinics using a codesign approach

Abstract

Background: Diabetes mellitus, a major cause of morbidity, is over-represented in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where the demand for expert care is rapidly outgrowing capacity, with poor data visibility contributing to delays in care. Digital health interventions, including point-of-care assessment tools and visualisation dashboards, have the capacity to streamline care and clinical workflows, and also improve efficiency of data acquisition, reduce errors, and improve compliance with evidence-based guidelines.   Aims: This study aimed to design and implement a digital diabetes assessment tool and dashboard for use in diabetes outpatient clinics at Western Health.   Methods: Key stakeholders were engaged and a codesign approach employed to explore ideal design criteria and functionality of the digital diabetes assessment tool. Iterative feedback was sought throughout a staged implementation to inform continual design improvements. Simultaneously, a diabetes dashboard was also designed and developed, to be kept up-to-date by routinely collected data automatically imported via the digital assessment tool.   Results: Ideal design features identified included the need for the assessment tool to fit within current clinic workflows and integrate with existing IT infrastructure, as well as to collect meaningful clinical data to auto-populate the visualisation dashboard.   Conclusion: Stakeholders worked together to design and implement a tool that is clear, efficient and clinically useful, and that integrates within existing organisational EMR infrastructure. The resulting digital diabetes assessment tool is currently being deployed across Western Health outpatient clinics and auto-populating the pilot diabetes dashboard, and will continue to be refined based on ongoing user feedback and adoption compliance metrics derived from the EMR.