Create Effective Dashboards: A Step-By-Step Guide: Design Principles and Applications in Medication Safety and Antimicrobial Stewardship

This peer-reviewed conference presentation addresses the role of effective dashboards in supporting medication safety programmes and antimicrobial stewardship initiatives. It outlines the rationale for dashboard use in monitoring implemented risk-reduction strategies and key performance indicators, enabling data-driven decision-making in healthcare settings. The presentation introduces six core visual perception principles—proximity, similarity, enclosure, closure, continuity, and connection—to enhance interpretability of complex data. Best-practice dashboard design principles, including simplicity, focus, and readability, are discussed. The session further classifies dashboards into strategic, operational, analytical, and tactical subtypes, with practical healthcare examples such as medication error monitoring, pharmacovigilance, IV/TPN safety, and antimicrobial stewardship dashboards. The work contributes to improving digital quality-improvement tools and clinical governance through evidence-informed visual analytics.