I think a dashboard gives healthcare professionals a lot more intuitive view of the general picture and saves them time and effort to try to visualize the data in their brain. Neatly compiled data combined with visual input allows healthcare workers to make quick and informed decisions. For example, if a patient’s information such as his BP or weight is recorded only as numbers in a table, the medical workers will have to extract the numbers from the paper, and attempt to visualize the temporal relationship and changes: is it rising or falling over last month? last year? A good dashboard would solve all these problems by presenting everything visually in a line chart/bar chart so that the workers won’t have to think anymore, they will see the data come to life. It also allows the general public to understand difficult medical data more easily. For example, during the COVID pandemic, Johns Hopkins University published a dashboard for COVID statistics. This allowed the general public to understand the global trend of the pandemic data.
I think the important characteristics of a dashboard are the exact same as that of the usage of language: it must be clear and concise. The colours and formats of the chart should be easy to read with all the important figures in sharp colours. The dashboard should not be overly complex (or else it will fail to achieve the effort of extraction and simplification), so only essential elements should be presented instead of attempting to present all the patient data in a dashboard. Of course, detailed characteristics would need to depend on the end user and the purpose of the dashboard itself.