The role and impact of hospital dashboards aligned to externally-driven quality care frameworks: A scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Quality assurance in hospitals is important to ensure patient safety and clinical care outcomes. As healthcare systems grow more complex, hospitals seek effective ways to monitor and improve care quality. Dashboards have emerged as valuable tools, providing real-time, data-driven insights for quality assurance and continuous improvement including demonstration of compliance with external regulatory and accreditation frameworks. OBJECTIVE: This scoping review aims to identify and summarise evidence for the role and impact of hospital dashboards aligned to regulatory quality care frameworks. METHODS: A scoping literature search was conducted on MEDLINE, Embase, Emcare, Global Health, and Web of Science databases, from each database's inception to October 2025. Studies were included if they described the implementation of dashboard(s) for inpatient hospital care, with measures aligned to an externally determined framework and outcome measures reported. Descriptive characteristics of dashboard purpose, quality measures, clinical setting and outcome measures were extracted. RESULTS: 21 studies were included in the analysis. Most of these studies were conducted in the United States (81%) and one study each from Australia, India, Oman, and the United Kingdom. Dashboards were primarily implemented at a hospital-wide level (76%), with 2 studies focused on specific departments or sites. Most studies reported impacts on process outcomes, including improved data timeliness, identification of performance gaps, enhanced dissemination, strengthened governance, improved workflow integration, and greater transparency and accountability. Over half of the studies (57%) reported a change in outcomes for at least one clinical measure over time. Except for a few measures, improvement in clinical outcomes was a trend across all studies and dashboards. CONCLUSIONS: Hospital dashboards aligned with externally driven quality care frameworks play a significant role in enhancing quality assurance processes and governance. While there was a trend for improvement in clinical outcomes, the observation is based on limited studies of low homogeneity.