Facilitating Public Health Action through Surveillance Dashboards

Introduction Traditionally, public health surveillance departments collect, analyze, interpret, and package information into static surveillance reports for distribution to stakeholders. This resource-intensive production and dissemination process has major shortcomings that impede end users from optimally utilizing this information for public health action. Often, by the time traditional reports are ready for dissemination they are outdated. Information can be difficult to find in long static reports and there is no capability to interact with the data by users. Instead, ad hoc data requests are made, resulting in inefficiencies and delays. Use of electronic dashboards for surveillance reporting is not new. Many public health departments have worked with information technology (IT) contractors to develop such technically sophisticated products requiring IT expertise. The technology and tools now exist to equip the public health workforce to develop in-house surveillance dashboards, which allow for unprecedented speed, flexibility, and cost savings while meeting the needs of stakeholders. At Alberta Health Services (AHS), in-house, end-to-end dashboard development infrastructure has been established that provides epidemiologists and data analysts full capabilities for effective and timely reporting of surveillance information.