We aimed to develop an easy-to-use interactive dashboard for managers to query static North Carolina reportable disease data. Access to historical reportable disease data is critical to being able to consistently answer questions about disease incidence and time trends, but access to static data is not possible through the production/dynamic North Carolina Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NC EDSS). A communicable disease data dashboard for managers’ use will assist public health practice by enabling quick identification of disease patterns, measurement of the efficacy of intervention programs, timely reporting to other government entities and responses to queries from non-government stakeholders and the general public.
METHODS:
Using SAS, we created a de-identified, limited dataset of 2010-2014 confirmed or probable disease events reportable to NC, CDC, or both. Each disease record included de-identified demographic information such as sex, age, county of residence at time of event and disease information including year and month of event and name of disease. Before and during the design process, we met iteratively with stakeholders who would be using the dashboard to ensure we included the correct data elements and that the interface design was visually informative and intuitive to use. We also worked with the NC Division of Public Health HIPAA officer and IT staff to determine an approved electronic storage location that enabled managers to have secure, confidential, non-Internet access to the data and the interface. Using Tableau Desktop business intelligence software, we designed a dashboard with selectable date, person, and disease parameters that displays results on a NC map and provides the optional ability to download the data to an Excel-compatible file.
RESULTS:
The dashboard displays an interactive map of North Carolina and its counties where clicking on a county displays annual incidence statistics for reportable diseases for that county. Users can view the distribution of disease status according to age, gender, disease, and year and month of event, and can download a file of results for further analysis. This geographical representation allows for faster, easier, and consistent querying of data for reporting and identifying areas of high incidence.
CONCLUSIONS:
The dashboard is being used by state communicable disease epidemiologists to answer data requests and questions. In the future it will also serve as a model for displaying our epidemiological incidence and rate data to the general public via our public website.