Big Data Health Care Innovations: Performance Dashboarding as a Process of Collective Sensemaking

Big data is poised to revolutionize health care, and performance dashboards can be an important tool to manage big data innovations. Dashboards show the progress being made and provide critical management information about effectiveness and efficiency. However, performance dashboards are more than just a clear and straightforward representation of performance in the health care context. Instead, the development and maintenance of informative dashboards can be more productively viewed as an interactive and iterative process involving all stakeholders. We refer to this process as dashboarding and reflect on our learnings within a large European Union–funded project. Within this project, multiple big data applications in health care are being developed, piloted, and scaled up. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which we cope with the inherent sensitivities and tensions surrounding dashboarding in such a dynamic environment.