Editorial: Improving Public Health Dashboards
A dashboard is a digital tool used to build an interactive, visual representation of data from a host of sources to monitor an organization's performance. Dashboards have become an important method of presenting public health related data, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
Many organizations have released dashboards for public use, particularly related to the visualization of COVID trends. The University of Illinois Informatics LifeLine staff believes that there are a number of shortcomings among many of the present dashboard efforts. These include:
Lack of easy and free access to dashboard capabilities to the audience involved in COVID response
A steep learning curve that makes it difficult to use the dashboard to develop insights
Most importantly, current dashboard designs often lack the ability to disaggregate data, making it difficult to assess the impact of different variables.
Fundamentally, dashboards must be designed to facilitate the ability to draw useful policy and operational insights. The maps derived from the COVID dashboard created by UIC-SPH-PHGIS development team highlight the value of creating dashboards that lead to operational insights. (The complete dashboard can be viewed here.) Maps derived from the dashboard show the need to disaggregate nursing home deaths from community wide death statistics. Changes in the geographic patterns of deaths from wave 1 to wave 2 are also important to evaluate if an accurate situational awareness is to be developed.
Source: COVID-19 Dashboard, Story Maps and Publications (Public Health Geographic Information Systems, University of Illinois at Chicago)
Source: COVID-19 Dashboard, Story Maps and Publications (Public Health Geographic Information Systems, University of Illinois at Chicago)
The field of public health informatics can be greatly advanced by the thoughtful design of dashboards. The development of healthy building conditions, the promotion of violence reduction responses, the availability and use of telemedicine resources, guidance with respect to food safety and emergency management best practices are a few of the areas that can be improved by the use of well-designed management oriented dashboards.
We need your help to define the direction in evolving this important tool of public health informatics. Informatics Lifeline would welcome your views on which subjects of dashboards should be high priority or how the design and dissemination of public health dashboards could be improved. Please send comments to infolife@gmail.com.
