Dynamic Data Visualizations for Public Health

By Tiara Jones, Dylan George

Effective epidemic management depends on public health situational awareness. Real-time situational awareness during an infectious disease epidemic requires timely collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to answer three important questions: (1) what is happening?; (2) where is it happening?; and (3) when do we anticipate impacts? Useful variables include, but are not limited to, location of outbreaks and transmissions, risk demographics, economics, case counts, transmission severity, personnel impacted and needed for the response, and infrastructure resource status. To coordinate an effective response, analysts must interpret these variables and provide decision makers with contextual actionable data, which is often best analyzed and conveyed visually.

Fortunately, there are a number of commercially available information technologies that facilitate real-time data collection and analysis. Evaluating and demonstrating technologies that allow rapid, real-time data analysis during an outbreak should provide public health agencies a clearer understanding of the impact these technologies could have in their resource-constrained environments.

B.Next completed a project with Plotly to enhance its web-based interface to enable the creation of interactive cross-filtering visualizations with multivariate datasets for non-coders. The evaluation of the capability, completed by IQT Labs personnel and public health analysts, suggests that the cross-filtering functionality within Plotly provides new capabilities accessible to non-coders, especially those public health organizations lacking the necessary resources to procure ‘point-and-click’ business intelligence tools. Further improvements to the Plotly tool are needed to be truly competitive with more intuitive interfaces. Read more about the details of the project in our technical report published on the B.Next website.

B.Next is designing a biodefense technology strategy, demonstrating the potential that innovative tools and techniques can provide, and supporting the investment strategies of these innovations.

Check out our work at www.bnext.org