Building Public Health Data Dashboards: A Tutorial Playbook

Public health data dashboards have substantial potential to improve transparency, understanding, and decision-making at multiple levels, from individuals to public health practitioners and policy makers. However, creating effective dashboards presents many challenges. In this case-based tutorial on public health dashboard development, we share lessons learned from our experience developing data dashboards for the HEALing Communities Study (HCS), an NIH-funded, community-engaged intervention to deploy evidence-based practices to reduce opioid overdose deaths in 67 communities across four states. We present key decision points dashboard teams must address, along with the major considerations and trade-offs that shaped our approach. 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. While the material can be read sequentially as a step-by-step guide, we refer to this resource as a "playbook" because readers may engage with specific domains in a random-access fashion-that is, based on their specific needs and/or starting point rather than a fixed sequence. The information, supplemental materials, and links will assist individuals and organizations seeking to build data dashboards by fostering context-sensitive evaluation of design and implementation choices to realize the promise of data-driven decision making.