Best Practices for COVID-19 Dashboards

Malkani, Dillon, Bullis School Malkani, Melina, Bullis School Singh, Neel, Landon School Madan, Eesha, BASIS Independent School McLean

Health informaticians develop and enhance health dashboards for public, for-profit and commercial entities. By understanding the best practices for the design specifically of COVID-19 Dashboards, informaticians will be able to enhance public-facing Dashboards that will help the public make better health decisions and ultimately improve population-level healthcare outcomes. The authors evaluated 50 County and State COVID-19 Dashboards around the United States and identified the top ten best practices to be considered when creating a dashboard. The features they found most useful are [1] navigation, [2] usability, [3] adjustable thresholds, [4] diverse chart selection, [5] Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, [6] tabulated data added into charts, [7] user feedback, [8] simplicity, [9] description, and [10] comparison between counties. The authors also conducted a survey of 60 individuals in Maryland supporting their findings for the top ten best practices for the design of COVID-19 dashboards. In summary, health dashboards to include COVID-19 dashboards should incorporate best practices in order to better communicate health information (i.e. vaccination booster rates) and in turn improve population-level healthcare outcomes.