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C.D. Hughes Design
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Northline Health2025

Making a clinical dashboard readable at 3am

A ground-up redesign of the care coordination tool used by nurses across eleven hospitals.

Northline Health cover image

Overview

Northline's coordination tool had grown by accretion for six years. Nurses kept a paper backup because the screen took too long to read during a handoff.

The challenge

Every team had asked for its own view, and the result was a dashboard with forty-one visible controls. The information a nurse needed in the first three seconds was buried below the fold.

Approach

We shadowed shift handoffs at three sites, then rebuilt the interface around the handoff moment: one patient summary, one action, everything else one tap away. The design system ships as tokens the engineering team consumes directly.

Outcome

Time to complete a handoff dropped by a third, and the paper backup disappeared from two of the three pilot units within a month.

Faster handoffs
34%
Sites researched
3
Components shipped
60
Patient summary, redesigned around the handoff
Patient summary, redesigned around the handoff
Component library and design tokens
Component library and design tokens
Night mode tested under clinical lighting
Night mode tested under clinical lighting