Successful organizations have the ability to measure and act on key indicators and events in real time. By leveraging the power of virtual instrumentation and open architecture standards, multidimensional executive dashboards can empower health care organizations to make better and faster data-driven decisions. This article will highlight how user-defined virtual instruments and dashboards can connect to hospital information systems (e.g., admissions/discharge/transfer systems, patient monitoring networks) and use statistical process control to "visualize" information and make timely, data-driven decisions. The case studies described will illustrate enterprisewide solutions for: bed management and census control, operational management, data mining and business intelligence applications, and clinical applications (physiological data acquisition and wound measurement and analysis).