Study protocol - Development of a multipurpose dashboard to monitor the situation of emergency departments

This study aims to develop dashboards dedicated to three possible types of users: citizens, ED staff, and policymakers. The dashboards will be fed automatically by various hospital information systems, including the ED electronic health record and the laboratory and radiology software, and will be evaluated for their perceived usefulness.

It is an observational, multicenter, qualitative study lasting 36 months.

A panel of experts for each type of end-user will be involved in dashboard development.

The local eCREAM UC2 platform, designed to extract information from the electronic medical records of the EDs, will be installed in each participating hospital in order to automatically collect the data necessary to feed the three dashboards. The data will involve patients arriving at the participating centers between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Information on the EDs’ organizational set-up will also be collected. Only the anonymized data needed to feed the three dashboards will be transmitted from the participating centers to the central eCREAM server for the necessary processing.

The usefulness of the dashboards will then be assessed by representatives of the three types of end-users through both the use of a questionnaire and participation in in-depth interviews on the usefulness, merits, and shortcomings of the dashboards developed.