Development and Implementation of a Dashboard for Diabetes Care Management in OpenMRS

A clinical dashboard for a patient's diabetes condition helps physicians to make better decisions based on readily available information. OpenMRS is a widely used open-source electronic health records system but does not provide a disease-specific dashboard. This project implemented a dashboard for displaying all diabetes-related lab measures at one place, when a physician accesses a patient record in OpenMRS. It summarizes a list of diabetes-related clinical measures through an intuitive, chart-based, customizable user experience. Gauge charts are used to display the most important lab values for Glucose, Renal Function, and Lipid Profile tests. Data Tables are used to display data of the lab values from the past and current visit in the table, including the ability to search for a specific visit date. Interactive line charts are used to display the trends of lab measures. Diabetes Dashboard may help physicians to make quicker decisions through this snapshot view. We took data for a few patients and demonstrated this to clinicians as a proof of concept, without performing a full-fledged user evaluation. Future work involves integrating this dashboard with clinical practice guidelines and alerting when measures are outside the guidelines.