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 requires 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 provides 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 identifies gaps in the current literature on the topic and provides 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). Through a lens of actionability assessment, the analysis shows that the scientific literature is considerably fragmented with respect to the goals, design, use, usefulness, and impact of these tools. However, actionability is shown to be a function of the process used to develop, evaluate, and sustain dashboards for the benefit of users.

Conclusions:

The scoping review analyzes the goals, design, use, usefulness, and impact of public health data dashboards. The review also informs the continued development and improvement of these tools by identifying gaps and synthesizing current practices and lessons emerging from the literature on the topic. There is a significant opportunity for future research to advance both scholarship and practice regarding the design, deployment, and sustainability of actionable dashboards by addressing the gaps.