A patient monitoring hub can communicate bidirectionally with external devices such as a board-in-cable or a dongle. Medical data can be communicated from the patient monitoring hub to the external devices to cause the external devices to initiate actions. For example, an external device can perform calculations based on data received from the patient monitoring hub, or take other actions (for example, creating a new patient profile, resetting baseline values for algorithms, calibrating algorithms, etc.). The external device can also communicate display characteristics associated with its data to the monitoring hub. The monitoring hub can calculate a set of options for combined layouts corresponding to different external devices or parameters. A display option may be selected for arranging a display screen estate on the monitoring hub.