At Fulton County Health Center, we believe that timely, accurate data is essential for delivering high-quality patient care. As we’ve expanded programs and taken on new quality initiatives, the need for efficient, real-time reporting has become increasingly clear. To meet this demand, we are leveraging powerful dashboards embedded in our EHR — and the impact has been significant with measurable time savings, increased data accessibility, and enhanced support for clinical decision-making across departments.
From manual reporting to real-time insight
One of our first priorities was tracking Emergency Department arrival-to-EKG times, for which we have a 5 minute goal. This supports our new ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) program and aligns with American Heart Association performance standards. Previously, collecting this data required pulling information from multiple systems, validating entries, and manually building reports — sometimes taking an hour or more just to analyze data for two patients.
By leveraging dashboards that are native within our EHR, we can now access this information instantly. This not only automates data gathering, but presents it in a visual format that clearly highlights performance against benchmarks. Color-coded indicators help us immediately identify where we’re meeting goals and where there’s room for improvement, enabling quicker action and more informed decision-making. These process-driven efficiencies have helped us meet and even surpass our ED goals.
Organization-wide adoption and time savings
As we expanded our use of analytics dashboards, other teams across our organization began to see the value. Our pharmacy director — initially skeptical of reporting tools — became an advocate after being impressed by the time from medication order to pharmacist verification dashboard, and shared her feedback with several executives. Several departments, including pharmacy, emergency, and IT teams, are now using a variety of dashboards to streamline processes and reduce reporting burdens:
- CPOE Tracking: In the past, generating a monthly report on Computerized Provider Order Entry required a lengthy Excel file that took at least 30 minutes to download and hours of manual work to analyze. Now, CPOE Tracking is instantly available via our dashboard
- ED Log Dashboard: Previously requiring 6–8 hours each month, this workflow now takes just 2–3 hours monthly thanks to automation and centralized data
- Pharmacy Workflows: These workflows allow for real-time tracking of medication reconciliation and pharmacist interventions, eliminating cross-system manual compilation
- Provider Scorecards and Bedside Medication Verification: Provider scorecards are widely used and offer insight into compliance, throughput, and performance goals
Improving clinical outcomes and the patient experience
These efficiencies are not just operational — they’re clinical. Reducing time spent on manual data management allows our teams to focus more on patient care. For instance, better visibility into ED throughput has helped us identify and address admission delays, directly improving the patient experience during transfers and wait times.
As part of our broader effort to improve care quality, dashboards are helping us ensure better documentation, more timely order entry, and faster clinical interventions. This level of insight supports both frontline staff and leadership in maintaining accountability and aligning with performance goals.
Expanding the role of analytics
By automating complex reporting and delivering trusted data directly to end users, our dashboards have become foundational to how we operate. What began as a solution for one department has grown into a system-wide approach to analytics that supports better decisions, higher efficiency, and ultimately, better care.
We view these dashboards as living tools that evolve with our data needs. Looking ahead, we’re building additional dashboards to support pharmacy discharge medication reviews, pain reassessment monitoring, anesthesia timing, and claims denial analysis to address reimbursement challenges. These tools will continue to help us meet clinical, regulatory, and financial objectives.
Our experience illustrates how embedded analytics tools can make a measurable difference in care quality, staff productivity, and leadership alignment. At Fulton County Health Center, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made moving from data wrangling to achieving real-time insights — and we’re even more excited for what’s ahead.
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