Built by epidemiologists for epidemiologists: an internal COVID-19 dashboard for real-time situational awareness in New York City

Stephanie Ngai; Jessica Sell; Samia Baig; Maryam Iqbal; Meredith Eddy; Gretchen Culp; Matthew Montesano; Emily McGibbon; Kimberly Johnson; Katelynn Devinney; Jennifer Baumgartner; Mary Huynh; Robert Mathes; Gretchen Van Wye; Annie D Fine; Corinne N Thompson

doi:10.1093/jamiaopen/ooac029

Built by epidemiologists for epidemiologists: an internal COVID-19 dashboard for real-time situational awareness in New York City

JAMIA Open. 2022 May 18;5(2):ooac029. doi: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooac029. eCollection 2022 Jul.

Authors

Stephanie Ngai¹, Jessica Sell¹, Samia Baig¹, Maryam Iqbal¹, Meredith Eddy¹, Gretchen Culp¹, Matthew Montesano¹, Emily McGibbon¹, Kimberly Johnson¹, Katelynn Devinney¹, Jennifer Baumgartner¹, Mary Huynh¹, Robert Mathes¹, Gretchen Van Wye¹, Annie D Fine¹, Corinne N Thompson¹

Affiliation

¹ The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Long Island City, New York, USA.

Abstract

Objective: New York City (NYC) experienced a large first wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the spring of 2020, but the Health Department lacked tools to easily visualize and analyze incoming surveillance data to inform response activities. To streamline ongoing surveillance, a group of infectious disease epidemiologists built an interactive dashboard using open-source software to monitor demographic, spatial, and temporal trends in COVID-19 epidemiology in NYC in near real-time for internal use by other surveillance and epidemiology experts.

Materials and methods: Existing surveillance databases and systems were leveraged to create daily analytic datasets of COVID-19 case and testing information, aggregated by week and key demographics. The dashboard was developed iteratively using R, and includes interactive graphs, tables, and maps summarizing recent COVID-19 epidemiologic trends. Additional data and interactive features were incorporated to provide further information on the spread of COVID-19 in NYC.

Results: The dashboard allows key staff to quickly review situational data, identify concerning trends, and easily maintain granular situational awareness of COVID-19 epidemiology in NYC.

Discussion: The dashboard is used to inform weekly surveillance summaries and alleviated the burden of manual report production on infectious disease epidemiologists. The system was built by and for epidemiologists, which is critical to its utility and functionality. Interactivity allows users to understand broad and granular data, and flexibility in dashboard development means new metrics and visualizations can be developed as needed.

Conclusions: Additional investment and development of public health informatics tools, along with standardized frameworks for local health jurisdictions to analyze and visualize data in emergencies, are warranted.

Keywords: COVID-19; data visualization; public health informatics; surveillance.

Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association 2022.