A power BI clinical dashboard for data-driven decision-making in palliative care: A case study of hospice of the valleys

Palliative care providers face growing patient demand alongside constrained staffing and funding, yet many organisations still rely on manual, spreadsheet-based reporting that offers little real-time visibility into caseload, resource use, or outcomes. This paper reports the design, development, and evaluation of an interactive clinical dashboard, built in Microsoft Power BI, for Hospice of the Valleys, a community palliative care provider in Wales. Guided by the CRISP-DM framework, three operational datasets (community care, day-centre, and hospital support) covering 2020–2024 were extracted from the CANISC and ICARE clinical systems, cleaned, integrated, and modelled into a star-schema data model. The resulting dashboard tracks key performance indicators including total patients, total visits, average length of care, mortality rate, and professional workload across four interactive pages. Applied to 487 patients and 2,498 recorded visits, the dashboard revealed a marked rise in new referrals (from 4 in 2020 to 264 in 2024), a near-even gender split (55% female, 45% male), a 52% prevalence of cancer diagnoses, an overall average length of care of 162 days, and a 34% mortality rate. The dashboard enabled dynamic filtering by care setting and time period, supporting operational planning and funding-evidence needs. The paper situates these findings within the wider clinical-dashboard literature, discusses the practical and ethical implications of the design choices made, and proposes future work centred on predictive analytics, expanded data capture, and real-time alerting. The study demonstrates that a modestly resourced palliative care provider can derive substantial decision-support value from commodity business-intelligence tooling when data governance and stakeholder engagement are prioritised throughout development.