Clinical Dashboards: Research & Discovery

The challenge

Clinical and operational leaders rely on multiple streams of information to manage resident care, staffing, admissions, discharges, occupancy, and organizational performance.

However, critical information was distributed across reports, product modules, and dashboard widgets. Users often had access to large volumes of data without an equally clear way to identify what required their attention.

The challenge was not simply to modernize dashboard interfaces. It was to understand which information different users needed, how they interpreted it, and what decisions that information was expected to support.

Research objectives

The discovery explored four central questions:

1. Which clinical and operational KPIs matter most to different user roles?

2. How do Directors of Nursing and other stakeholders use census, staffing, and resident information in everyday decision-making?

3. What makes existing dashboards difficult to use, customize, or trust?

4. How might a dashboard provide a useful overview without overwhelming users with information?

A central product consideration was to identify the two or three most valuable indicators for an initial dashboard experience rather than attempting to display everything at once.

What the research revealed

1. Fragmented information increased cognitive effort.

   Users needed to connect census, occupancy, admissions, staffing, and other operational data to form a useful picture of what was happening across their facilities.

2. KPIs were valuable only in the context of decisions.

   Directors of Nursing needed visibility into admissions and discharges, average daily census, payer mix, readmissions, staffing skill levels, and unit capacity. Different indicators supported different planning and care-management decisions.

3. Fixed dashboards could not accommodate individual workflows.

   Role-based templates provided a starting point, but users needed flexibility to select, remove, and rearrange widgets according to their responsibilities.

4. Trends mattered as much as current values.

   Users wanted to understand how census, occupancy, and related indicators changed over time, not simply see a snapshot of the current day.

5. Dashboards needed to direct attention.

   A high-level overview, meaningful alerts, and access to supporting detail could help users identify unusual changes, capacity concerns, or situations requiring follow-up.

Design opportunities identified

The findings pointed toward a dashboard experience built around role relevance, progressive disclosure, and user control.

Research to design framework

1. Understand the user: Role, responsibilities, decisions, workflows

2. Prioritize information: Critical KPIs, trends, exceptions, context

3. Structure the experience: Overview, drill-down, personalization, alerts

4. Support better decisions: Earlier awareness, clearer priorities, less information hunting

The product direction included customizable widgets, role-sensitive starting points, clearer census and staffing trends, contextual drill-downs, and improved integration across existing MatrixCare information sources.

These were design opportunities arising from discovery—not confirmed implemented outcomes.

Research and stakeholder engagement

The earlier conversations also document a broader series of customer discovery sessions around MatrixCare dashboards and analytics.

These involved clinical, reimbursement, financial, and operational stakeholders from senior living and post-acute care organizations.

How the discovery was approached

The research included:

• Internal stakeholder alignment: Discussions around the dashboard MVP, existing widget limitations, product dependencies, and identifying a focused initial set of KPIs.

• Customer focus groups: Exploring how stakeholders currently accessed information, which reports they relied on, and what they found difficult.

• Workflow investigation: Understanding how daily census, admissions, discharges, staffing, payer mix, and other indicators influenced operational decisions.

• Cross-functional synthesis: Translating findings into information priorities, customization requirements, and dashboard design opportunities.

One particularly useful discussion involved a clinical and compliance stakeholder at Cassia. It showed how daily census information connected directly to staffing decisions, resident acuity, financial planning, and clinical follow-up.

This reinforced the need to consider the dashboard as a decision-support experience, rather than simply a reporting interface.

Workshop and synthesis

The previous discussions establish that the team was exploring KPI prioritization, user needs, dashboard configuration, and the scope of an initial MVP.

However, I couldn't verify the exact facilitated workshop structure—such as the number of participants, exercises, duration, or whether specific activities like card sorting and collaborative prioritization were conducted.

For your portfolio, I would frame the workshop's central research problem as:

How might we identify and prioritize the information that clinical leaders need most, while designing a dashboard flexible enough to accommodate different responsibilities and decision-making contexts?

This gives you a strong organizing question without inventing workshop activities.

Research contribution and impact

The documented contribution was a clearer understanding of clinical and operational information needs, including:

• Which metrics deserved prominence in the dashboard.

• Why individual users needed control over widget selection and arrangement.

• Where historical trends and facility-level comparisons were necessary.

• How dashboards could better support staffing, capacity planning, and resident care decisions.

• Why dashboard improvements needed to consider existing technical constraints and incremental implementation.

The strongest defensible outcome is a research-informed product direction, not a quantified improvement in clinical performance. I haven't found a verified post-launch metric for this project.