JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Public health data dashboards have tremendous potential to improve transparency, understanding, and decision-making at multiple levels: from individuals to public health practitioners and policy makers, as well as locally, regionally, and nationally. However, there are many challenges to creating effective dashboards. In this playbook for the development of dashboards of public health data, we share lessons learned from our experience in developing data dashboards for the HEALing Communities Study (HCS). The HCS was a large NIH-funded study of a community-engaged intervention to deploy evidence-based practices to reduce opioid overdose deaths in 67 communities across four states. First, we describe core considerations of the who, what, why, where, when, and how of data dashboard development. Next, we outline steps in data curation, including the identification of key metrics and potential data sources, and developing processes to acquire the data. Third, we discuss practical aspects of developing data visualizations that can effectively communicate key messages to the end-users of interest. Fourth, we describe the infrastructure considerations to host and publish data dashboards. And finally, we discuss maintenance and sustainability of the dashboard. We anticipate this playbook will provide a resource to individuals and organizations seeking to build data dashboards to realize the promise of sharing data to improve data-driven decision making.