The Mission Control Surgical Dashboard

This project is a complete redesign of a hospital's surgical scheduling board, transforming it from a static, often outdated list into a real-time, at-a-glance "mission control" center. The goal was to create a single source of truth for the entire surgical team, improving communication, maximizing operating room (OR) utilization, and enhancing patient safety through radical clarity.

Traditional surgical scheduling boards—whether a physical whiteboard or a simple spreadsheet—are chaotic and prone to error. Information quickly becomes outdated, leading to constant interruptions, phone calls, and word-of-mouth updates.

For the OR Charge Nurse, who acts as the air traffic controller of the surgical suite, this lack of real-time visibility creates immense stress and leads to:

Inefficient room turnover and delays.

Difficulty placing emergency add-on cases.

Communication breakdowns between surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nursing staff.

My objective was to design a dashboard that empowers the Charge Nurse and the entire team with instant situational awareness.

For the User (Charge Nurse): To see the live status of every room, surgeon, and case from across the room, allowing for proactive, not reactive, decision-making.

For the Business (Hospital): To maximize OR utilization, improve patient throughput, and reduce costly delays and communication errors.

Role: UX/UI Designer

Skills: Information Architecture, Dashboard Design, Data Visualization, UX Strategy, UI Design

My core strategy was to organize the dashboard to mirror the physical layout and mental model of the surgical suite. Instead of a timeline-based Gantt chart, I opted for a Column-per-OR layout. This allows for a much richer, multi-faceted view of each individual room's status, upcoming schedule, and any active problems.

The entire design is built on the principle of "at-a-glance" readability, ensuring the most critical information is understood in seconds, even from a distance.

The final design is a modular dashboard where each component serves a distinct purpose, creating a clear, scannable information hierarchy.

Each vertical column is dedicated to a single operating room (OR 1, OR 2, etc.). This provides an intuitive structure where staff can instantly locate information for a specific room without having to scan a complex chart.

This redesign provides a clear, real-time source of truth that is projected to:

Increase OR Utilization by identifying available windows for add-on cases.

Reduce Communication Errors and overhead for the entire surgical team.

Enhance Team Coordination by providing a shared, live view of the day's schedule and challenges.

Decrease Staff Stress by replacing chaos and uncertainty with clarity and control.

In a high-stakes environment like an operating room, good design is not a luxury; it is a critical component of safety and efficiency. This project demonstrates how thoughtful information architecture and data visualization can bring order to chaos and empower clinical teams to do their best work.