Figured it out myself.....just had to reach way back to web development days. Will answer to share what I did.
On the div tag that defines the dashboard panel you want to be clickable....add an onclick
<div class="dashboard-panel clearfix" onclick="myhref('http://mysplunkserver:8000/en-US/app/next_level_dashboard');">
Then create a javascript handler for the onclick
<script type="text/javascript">
function myhref(web){
window.location.href = web;}
</script>
