U.S. COVID-19 State Government Public Dashboards: An Expert Review

Abstract

Background In the United States, all 50 state governments deployed publicly viewable dashboards regarding the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to track and respond to the pandemic. States dashboards, however, reflect idiosyncratic design practices based on their content, function, and visual design and platform. There has been little guidance for what state dashboards should look like or contain, leading to significant variation. Objectives The primary objective of our study was to catalog how information, system function, and user interface were deployed across the COVID-19 state dashboards. Our secondary objective was to group and characterize the dashboards based on the information we collected using clustering analysis. Methods For preliminary data collection, we developed a framework to first analyze two dashboards as a group and reach agreement on coding. We subsequently doubled coded the remaining 48 dashboards using the framework and reviewed the coding to reach total consensus. Results All state dashboards included maps and graphs, most frequently line charts, bar charts, and histograms. The most represented metrics were total deaths, total cases, new cases, laboratory tests, and hospitalization. Decisions on how metrics were aggregated and stratified greatly varied across dashboards. Overall, the dashboards were very interactive with 96% having at least some functionality including tooltips, zooming, or exporting capabilities. For visual design and platform, we noted that the software was dominated by a few major organizations. Our cluster analysis yielded a six-cluster solution, and each cluster provided additional insights about how groups of states engaged in specific practices in dashboard design. Conclusion Our study indicates that states engaged in dashboard practices that generally aligned with many of the goals set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Essential Public Health Services. We highlight areas where states fall short of these expectations and provide specific design recommendations to address these gaps.

Developing and testing an integrated patient mHealth and provider dashboard application system for type 2 diabetes management among Medicaid-enrolled pregnant individuals based on a user-centered approach: Mixed-methods study

“…We conducted usability testing and think-aloud sessions with patients and providers. The aim of these interviews was to systematically collect feedback about the prototypes using a deductive approach based on our prior work on decision support tools [47,48]. We categorized identified themes into one of three categories: (1) function, issues that are related to meaningful and intuitive navigation of an application; (2) content, problems with information provided in an application that complicate or lead to misinterpretation of information; and (3) aesthetics, concerns that impede an application from having a minimalist design that effectively communicates information.…”

Framework to Evaluate Level of Good Faith in Implementations of Public Dashboards

“…The COVID-19 pandemic brought to attention a longstanding need for welldesigned dashboards in public health and medicine [4]. It also brought to light that there are no uniform guiding principles behind developing publicly-facing dashboards intended to serve public interests.…”

“…It also brought to light that there are no uniform guiding principles behind developing publicly-facing dashboards intended to serve public interests. As a prime example, a recent review of United States (US) government public dashboards for COVID-19 found that "states engaged in dashboard practices that generally aligned with many of the goals set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Essential Public Health Services" (from abstract) [4]. However, the results of this review do not address whether the public was adequately served by any of these dashboards that were funded with the public's money.…”

COVID-19 Data Utilization in North Carolina: Qualitative Analysis of Stakeholder Experiences

“…In the United States, all 50 state governments use COVID-19 dashboards that are publicly available. These dashboards contain interactive maps and graphs and report indicators such as deaths, cases, and hospitalizations [31,32]. Widely used during the current pandemic, models have served a number of purposes, including predicting the spread of the virus [33][34][35][36][37] and for evaluating mitigation strategies [38][39][40].…”