Quartile dashboards: translating large data sets into performance improvement priorities.

Quality professionals are the first to understand challenges of transforming data into meaningful information for frontline staff, operational managers, and governing bodies. To understand an individual facility, service, or patient care unit's comparative performance from within large data sets, prioritization and focused data presentation are needed. This article presents a methodology for translating data from large data sets into dashboards for setting performance improvement priorities, in a simple way that takes advantage of tools readily available and easily used by support staff. This methodology is illustrated with examples from a large nursing quality data set, the California Nursing Outcomes Coalition.