PHADS
Data can be used to tell stories about public health in an interactive, interesting way so anyone can understand or be inspired by its insights. The Public Health Analytics Data Storytelling project was created to do just that. More specifically, the Office and Data Analytics is partnering IDOH program areas to create interactive dashboards that help tell their stories and inform the public.
Project Overview
Sharing data with the public and external partners is important to the Indiana Department of Health. The Stats Explorer website, which has been decommissioned as of Q4 of 2023, served as a way to make data accessible. The PHADS initiative was created to support the creation of public dashboards that would serve as a replacement.
PHADS Goals:
- Understand what each program area publishes and how IDOH can improve how we gathering, preparing, and share the data publicly
- Reduce the number of manually fulfilled data requests
- Lessen the workload on program areas to fulfill data requests.
Currently, dashboards and data stories are being created on the IDOH website for each program area.
Approach
To deliver each program area dashboard, we leveraged IDOH’s new data environment, ACE and developed dashboards using Tableau. ACE is a critical component of this initiative and has allowed our data engineers to store, transform, and automate the refresh of data needed for each dashboard.
The PHADS initiative will leverage the best practices established by another DARTT project, the Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI COE). To learn more about how our BI practice is standardizing work to fulfill the agency’s data visualization needs, click here.
Outcome: Dashboards
All PHADS dashboards are public facing— which means you also have access to view them.
Sharing public data is a testament to the hard work of IDOH’s program areas. These dashboards are a way to recognize the critical role our programs play in being able to provide trusted and impactful data to local health departments (LHDs), clinicians/providers, and the general public.
An additional goal of PHADS is to reduce the number of data requests that need to be manually fulfilled by IDOH. The PHADS program-area specific dashboards should also lessen the workload on program areas to fulfill data requests.
Dashboards in Development:
- Lead dashboard
- Infectious Disease Surveillance dashboard
- Vital Records Surveillance dashboard
- Indiana Cancer-at-a-Glance dashboard
- Mosquito dashboard enhancements
- Birth Outcomes dashboard
- Birth Defects dashboard
- Influenza (flu) dashboard enhancements
- Respiratory dashboard
- Violent Death dashboard
- Trauma dashboard
Contact
To produce dashboards, we are working with respective program areas, data owners, ODA, and OTC. If you would like to learn more or potentially collaborate on building dashboards, please reach out to Jamie Black, jamblack@health.in.gov, and Peter Krombach, PKrombach1@health.in.gov.
