The Kanban Board EHR: Why Your Patient List Should Feel Like Trello

Have you ever used Trello or Jira for a personal project? Maybe planning a vacation, managing a home renovation, or organizing a research paper? If so, you've experienced that satisfying feeling of dragging a task from "To Do" to "In Progress" to "Done."

Now imagine if managing your patients felt that intuitive.

The Tweet That Started It All

In 2019 Mario tweeted this out to the twitterverse:

Twitter post from @MarioATX_MD

"Transitioned to trello from jira and I have to say. This is what an EHR experience should feel like. Story boards with video, chat, and text follow ups. QA with med management for adding labs or imaging. Team collaboration where everyone comes together to improve patient care."

The response was immediate and telling:

Twitter post from @Nikillinit

"If only healthcare had low switching cost for tools + the ehr was actually built for coordinated care :("

The second comment hits hard. It captures the core frustration: EHRs weren't built for how doctors actually work. They weren't designed for coordinated care. And switching to something better feels impossible.

But what if you didn't have to switch your entire EHR? What if you could just build a better interface on top of it? 🤔

What's a Kanban Board Anyway?

If you're not familiar with project management tools, here's the basics. A Kanban board is a visual system for tracking work. It uses columns (usually something like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done") and cards that you move across those columns as work progresses.
The concept comes from agile project management, which focuses on flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Software teams use it. Marketing teams use it. Construction crews use it. It works because it matches how humans actually think about progress.
You see the whole picture at a glance. You know what needs attention. You can spot bottlenecks immediately. And there's something deeply satisfying about moving a card to "Done."

The Problem with Your Current EHR Patient List

Let's be honest about how your current EHR handles patient information. Your patient data is scattered across multiple tabs and dashboards. To understand what's actually going on with a single patient, you're clicking through:

• Demographics
• Problem list
• Medications
• Labs
• Imaging
• Notes from previous visits
• Pending orders
• Referrals
• Messages

Each piece lives in its own silo. There's no unified view of where that patient is in their care journey. You're mentally assembling a puzzle every time you open a chart.


Now multiply that by 20-30 patients on your daily schedule. It's exhausting.

Single Player Mode vs. Team Player Mode

Here's a gaming analogy that makes perfect sense once you hear it. Your current EHR operates in "single player mode." It's built for one person to access information at a time. Sure, multiple people can technically be in the chart, but there's no real collaboration happening.

The problem: healthcare isn't a single player. You have nurses, medical assistants, specialists, care coordinators, and sometimes family members all involved in one patient's care. But your EHR forces everyone to work in isolation, then piece together information through phone calls, messages, and handwritten notes.

What if your EHR operated in "team player mode" instead? Where everyone could see the same board, collaborate in real time, and move care forward together?

Enter the Kanban Board EHR

This is where the magic happens. Imagine transforming your patient list into a visual board where each patient is a card and each stage of care is a column.

Cline - Cline Kanban Board Use Case Example

Instead of tabs and clicks, you see everything at once:

You drag and drop patient cards from left to right as care progresses. It's visual, intuitive, and requires zero training to understand.

How It Actually Works

Let's walk through a real scenario. You have a patient with diabetes, hypertension, and a recent knee injury. In your current EHR, managing these three issues simultaneously means:

• Navigating to the problem list
• Checking medications across multiple screens
• Looking at lab results in a separate section
• Finding imaging reports for the knee
• Reviewing notes from orthopedics, endocrinologist, and primary care
• Checking if physical therapy was scheduled
• Validating coverage or maybe even requesting prior authorization

It's information archaeology.

With a Kanban board approach, you create a board for this specific patient. Each of their issues becomes a card:

You see their entire treatment picture in one view. As each issue progresses, you move the card. When the knee is healed, that card goes to "Resolved." When diabetes is well-controlled, it moves to "Maintenance."

Your care team sees the same board. The nurse updates the blood pressure card after a visit. The medical assistant adds a note about the PT appointment. Everyone is working from the same visual representation of the patient's care.

The Agile Approach to Patient Care

Here's what makes the Kanban system powerful for healthcare: it follows agile principles. That means:

Flexibility: Care plans change. Lab results come back. Patients don't respond to first-line treatment. The board adapts as quickly as you need it to.

Visibility: You see bottlenecks immediately. If too many patients are stuck in "Waiting for Specialist Referral," that's a process problem you can address.

Collaboration: Your entire team works from the same source of truth. No more "Did anyone follow up on that lab or payment?" questions.

Continuous Improvement: Over time, you start to see patterns in your workflow. You can optimize based on what you actually see happening, not what you think is happening.

Why This Matters for Coordination of Care

Remember that second tweet? "If only healthcare had low switching cost for tools + the ehr was actually built for coordinated care."

This is the heart of it. Modern healthcare requires coordination. Primary care, specialists, allied health professionals, care managers, and patients themselves all need to work together. But the tools don't support that reality.

The Kanban board approach transforms coordination from a series of phone calls and messages into a shared visual workspace. Everyone sees where the patient is in their care journey. Everyone can contribute updates. Everyone knows what needs to happen next.

It's the difference between a group text thread trying to plan a trip (chaos) and a shared Trello board where everyone can see the itinerary, assignments, and progress (organized and effective).

Building It with Cline

Here's the best part: you don't need to wait for your EHR vendor to build this feature. You probably never will, honestly. They're busy maintaining their legacy systems and selling to hospital administrators, not solving workflow problems for individual doctors.

With Cline, you can build your own Kanban board interface that sits on top of your existing EHR. Because Cline is EHR-native, it connects directly to your patient data. You're not creating another disconnected tool. You're building a better way to view and interact with the data you already have.

You describe what you want: "I need a visual board where I can see all my diabetic patients and track them through screening, diagnosis, treatment initiation, and stable management."

Cline builds it. You customize it. Your team starts using it. And suddenly, managing your patient panel feels less like archaeology and more like actually practicing medicine.

The Bigger Vision

The Kanban board is just one example of what becomes possible when doctors can build their own tools. It represents a fundamental shift in how we think about EHR design.

Instead of forcing every doctor to work the same way, what if each practice could customize their interface to match how they actually deliver care? Pediatricians track different things than cardiologists. Rural practices have different workflows than urban urgent care centers. Your patient population has unique needs.

The technology exists to make this customization possible. The only thing holding us back is the assumption that doctors need to accept whatever interface their EHR vendor provides.

You wouldn't accept a one-size-fits-all approach to patient care. So why accept it for the tools you use to deliver that care?

Start Building Your Better EHR Interface

If the idea of a Kanban board EHR resonates with you, or if you have your own ideas about how your patient list should work, we'd love to hear from you. Cline is helping doctors build custom interfaces that actually match their workflow. No coding experience required. No separate systems to manage. Just better tools built on top of the EHR you already use.

Ready to transform your patient list? Contact us at practice@withcline.com to see how Cline can help you build a Kanban board EHR or any other custom interface your practice needs.