Developing Public Health Surveillance Dashboards: A Scoping Review on the Design Principles

Abstract

Background Public health dashboards facilitate the monitoring and prediction of disease outbreaks by continuously monitoring the health status of the community. This study aimed to identify design principles and determinants for developing public health surveillance dashboards. Methodology This scoping review is based on Arksey and O'Malley's framework as included in JBI guidance. Four databases were used to review and present the proposed principles of designing public health dashboards: IEEE, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. We considered articles published between 2010 and 2022. The final search of articles was done on November 30, 2022. Only articles in English language were included. Qualitative synthesis and trend analysis was conducted. Results Findings from sixty-seven articles out of 543 retrieved articles which were eligible for analysis, indicate that most of the dashboards designed from 2020 onwards were at the national level for managing and monitoring COVID-19. Design principles for the public health dashboard were presented in five groups, i.e., considering aim and target users, appropriate content, interface, data analysis and presentation types, and infrastructure. Conclusion Effective and efficient use of dashboards in public health surveillance requires putting the design principles into practice to improve the functionality of these systems in monitoring and decision making. Taking requirements of users into account, developing a robust infrastructure for improving data accessibility, developing and applying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for data processing and reporting purposes, and designing interactive and intuitive interfaces are key for successful design and development.