JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of robust public health data systems and the potential utility of data dashboards for ensuring access of diverse groups of stakeholders and decision-makers to critical public health data. As dashboards are becoming ubiquitous, it is imperative to consider how they may be best integrated with public health data systems and the decision-making routines of diverse audiences. However, additional progress on the continued development, improvement, and sustainability of these tools require the integration and synthesis of a largely fragmented scholarship regarding the purpose, design principles and features, successful implementation, and decision-making supports provided by effective public health data dashboards across diverse users and applications.

Objective:

This scoping review will provide a descriptive and thematic overview of national public health data dashboards, including their purpose, intended audiences, health topics, design elements, impact, and underlying mechanisms of use and usefulness of these tools in decision-making processes. It seeks to identify gaps in the current literature on the topic and provide the first-of-its-kind systematic treatment of actionability as a critical design element of public health data dashboards.

Methods:

The scoping review follows the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The review considers English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and reports that describe the design, implementation, and/or evaluation of a public health dashboard published between 2000-2023. The search strategy covers scholarly databases (CINAHL, PubMed, MEDLINE, and Web of Science) as well as grey literature sources and snowballing techniques. An iterative process of testing for and improving intercoder reliability was implemented to ensure that coders are properly trained to screen documents according to the inclusion criteria prior to beginning full review of relevant articles.

Results:

The search process initially identified 2,544 documents including articles located via databases, grey literature searching and snowballing. Following the removal of duplicate documents (n=1416) and non-relevant items (n=839), 289 met the inclusion criteria. These documents are categorized into three groups: US case studies (n=90), non-US case studies (n=126), and literature reviews and background information (n=73). Data extraction will focus on key variables, including public health data characteristics, dashboard design elements and functionalities, intended users, usability, logistics and operation, and indicators of usefulness, and impact reported.

Conclusions:

The scoping review will analyze the goals, design, use, usefulness, and impact of public health data dashboards. The review will also inform the continued development and improvement of these tools by analyzing and synthesizing current practices and lessons emerging from the literature on the topic and proposing a theory-grounded and evidence-informed framework for designing, implementing, and evaluating public health data dashboards.