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This content has a new home in Confluence. This site is no longer being updated as of July 25, 2025.
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This page contains high-level information about Dovetail and the MACBIS workspace.
Table of Contents
Dovetail is a collaborative, qualitative data analysis platform and research repository. It is the enterprise research repository, or repo, for HCD at the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS). This means it is a hub for storing and sharing CMCS user research and a research workspace for teams that are doing HCD.
That might seem like a lot of jargon, so let’s break it down.
Qualitative research is a core part of human-centered design (HCD). At the outset, HCD focuses on understanding the nature of people’s experiences and finding the right problems to solve. To do this, qualitative research often emphasizes stories—drawing stories out from the data and conveying stories about users’ experiences. This is where Dovetail can come in.
The target users of Dovetail in CMCS are contractor teams and, to a lesser degree, CMS employees. Product Leads, in particular, may want to use Dovetail. CMCS leaders, though, tend not to use Dovetail very much. Confluence is still the primary location for sharing research with CMCS leaders and stakeholders.
For guidance on how to integrate your dovetail research into Confluence, check out our section on Sharing and Presenting Research.
The goal of using Dovetail is to create a culture of shared insights, experiences, and collaboration in CMCS. This culture would exist within teams and across teams and generations of contractors.
Dovetail excels when it comes to: