Investing in the Future: Student Partnerships Powering the Bree Collaborative’s Evaluation Strategy

Beacon, April 2, 2026

Real-world experience is essential to developing a competent, capable future workforce — and our support of student learning demonstrate what’s possible when academic talent meets mission-driven work.

Since Spring 2025, the Bree Collaborative has had the privilege of partnering with two exceptional university teams: students from Washington State University’s (WSU) School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a student from the University of Washington’s (UW) Department of Health Systems and Population Health. Together, they tackled an ambitious goal of building a suite of dashboards to help us better understand our reach, engagement, and impact.

Building the Foundation: The WSU Team

The WSU team took on the challenge of designing and implementing a data pipeline to collect and consolidate information from a variety of platforms into one centralized location. Working within significant resource constraints, they found creative solutions using free and existing tools, including Amazon Web Services, PowerBI, MongoDB, and GitHub. Their ingenuity in navigating these limitations was impressive, and their work established the technical backbone for our future work.

Refining the Vision: The UW Capstone Student

Building on the foundation the WSU team created, our UW capstone student focused on translating raw data into meaningful insight. Through in-depth research into the needs of Bree staff and board members, she refined and enhanced the PowerBI dashboards and successfully embedded them into an internal website. Her work elevated the visuals from functional to genuinely actionable, making complex information more digestible and useful for decision-makers.

What These Dashboards Mean for Our Work

The dashboards these students designed and developed will give Bree Collaborative staff and board members a clearer, more comprehensive picture of the individuals and organizations engaged in our guideline work groups, implementation efforts, and evaluation activities. They will also provide valuable insights into the reach and effectiveness of our social media campaigns and help us sharpen our communication strategies, broaden dissemination of our guidelines, and identify new opportunities for implementation and evaluation.

A Well-Deserved Thank You

We are deeply grateful to each of these students for their dedication, creativity, and meaningful contributions to the Bree Collaborative’s mission. We also extend our warmest congratulations to all of them as they graduate and step into the next chapter of their careers. We have no doubt they will bring this same talent and drive to everything ahead of them.

Are you a Bree board member or a current or former work group member? We’d love to show you what our students built. To request a demonstration of the current dashboard, please contact Karie Nicholas at knicholas@qualityhealth.org.