Is Metabase Suitable for Building a Dynamic Patient Monitoring Board Instead of Traditional BI Dashboards?

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1

Hello,

I currently have the latest Open Source (Free) version of Metabase installed on my AKS cluster.

I am looking for guidance on how to design and implement an operational dashboard for hospital telemonitoring / homecare services. I am not looking for a traditional BI dashboard (bar charts, line charts, etc.), but rather a large visual board containing many patient cards that behave dynamically.

Context

  • We store our data in MySQL (patients, service status, admission dates, monitoring protocols, alerts/status checks, etc.).
  • We already use Metabase for analytical dashboards and embed them via iframes within our own dashboard platform.
  • For this operational view, we need a custom card design (fixed layout similar to a clinical record), color-coded alerts, and automatic content updates.

Functional Requirements

  1. A single dashboard type (we do not need a card builder or multiple card templates at this stage).

  2. One card per active patient — the system should automatically generate N cards based on the number of patients returned by the query.

  3. Automatic card creation and removal:

    • If a patient becomes Active, a new card should appear on the dashboard.
    • If a patient is discharged or is no longer active, the card should automatically disappear.

  4. Content must update automatically without manual intervention, for example:

    • Days under telemonitoring (today = 1, tomorrow = 2, etc.).
    • Monitoring schedules, admission/start date, and patient status text.
    • Alert/status flags (urgent cases, transfers, critical results, etc.).

  5. Conditional formatting based on business rules, for example:

    • Different border or background color when an alert is active.
    • Highlighted status checks or completed monitoring tasks.

Typical Information Displayed on Each Card

  • Patient name, national ID (RUT), and age
  • Telemonitoring start date and number of days under monitoring
  • Scheduled monitoring times
  • Free-text patient status summary
  • Multiple checkbox-style indicators

What We Do NOT Want

  • We do not want to manually create or maintain one card per patient.

Question

Can something like this be achieved with Metabase, either in the Open Source version or any paid/Enterprise version? Or is this simply outside of Metabase’s capabilities, meaning we should be looking at a completely different solution for building this type of dashboard?

Thank you.

2

this sound a bit similar to this feature request: Add native Kanban visualization driven by database queries · Issue #68782 · metabase/metabase · GitHub :

  • the cards representing the patients with their key data would be displayed in rows (at least one row)
  • they have conditional formatting applied (although the styles requested here are a bit different to what is already available)
  • the dashboard would refresh itself. But: as of now, this is configured in a static interval of seconds, so if anything changes in between, it's only seen after the next refresh. If an attribute changes from green to red and back to green in this timeframe, this change is not displayed.
  • but maybe with the newly added custom visualizations this could be customized...? That would be a topic for experts on this field....
3

Yo can build this with our new custom visualization feature

4

Hi, yes, exactly. I was trying to build something very similar to what is discussed in that GitHub post, but in Metabase the closest thing I could find was a table with rows and columns to display the information, which was visually quite far from what we needed.

In the end, I built a microservice to handle this functionality and exposed it so that it could be embedded into our dashboard platform, where we also embed Metabase dashboards.

Now I have a grid of cards that refresh automatically every "x" amount of time, and if certain conditions are met, the cards change color.

That was the main idea: having a grid of cards instead of having to manually develop each detail card independently to display information on its own.

thanks.