Introduction
What Cadence Clinical is, who it is for and what state it is in.
Cadence Clinical is an open source design system for software used by doctors, nurses and pharmacists. It gives you React components that stay legible and consistent on dense clinical screens.
Pre-release
Cadence is under active development. The packages are not yet published to npm, and the API will change. Do not use it for patient care.
What is in it
Cadence has two layers of components and a set of supporting packages.
| Package | Purpose | Status |
|---|---|---|
@cadence-clinical/ui | Primitives such as Button, built on Base UI and Tailwind CSS. | Started |
@cadence-clinical/tokens | Colour modes, density, accents and the accent validator. | Started |
@cadence-clinical/core | The Region contract and the component grade schema. | Started |
@cadence-clinical/clinical | Clinical components built on the primitives, such as vital signs and observation charts. | Planned |
@cadence-clinical/fhir | Functions that turn FHIR R4 resources into the concise props the components take. | Planned |
@cadence-clinical/au | Australian conventions and cited clinical rule sets, supplied as a Region. | Planned |
How it differs from a general design system
- Status colours are fixed. Critical, warning and success look the same in every theme. A brand changes the accent, never the meaning of red. See Theming.
- Components display an interpretation. They do not make one. No component contains a clinical threshold. See Clinical safety.
- Regional conventions are supplied, not built in. Units, date formats and rule sets come from a Region object, so a deployment in another health system swaps the Region and keeps the components.
- Every component carries a grade that says how far it has been verified. See Grades.