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As the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated, the role of local data in guiding public health action cannot be overstated. Government agencies, frontline community organizations, health care institutions, policymakers, researchers, and advocates all depend on data to guide their work and, especially during COVID-19, take swift action. Much has been written about gaps in the nation's surveillance capacity and the need to improve reporting timeliness.1 Less has been written about an ever-growing array of health-related data aggregation dashboards that have stepped in to address some of these gaps. These resources build on surveillance tenets (to provide data to assess burden and distribution of adverse health events and prioritize public health actions) and share the premise that data draw power and value from being placed in context and compared across jurisdictions and geographies, overtime, between population groups, and by community characteristics. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind data dashboards has been an effort to reframe how we think about health and its many determinants. Another driving force has been the goal of making data available to wider and more diverse audiences, often with visualizations intended to catalyze change. But are these data dashboards meeting their intended promise? Are they useful to public health stakeholders? We believe the answer is rapidly trending toward "yes."
The introduction of data dashboards by nongovernmental entities is relatively recent. One of the first, the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHRR), was released in 2010 by the University of Wisconsin in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.2 By parsing data from multiple data sources, CHRR provided the public with ready access to county-level data on a host of metrics. Since then, foundations and federal agencies have supported the development of other dashboards to expand access to data on health and its drivers.1 The purposes of dashboards can vary. Some analyze health and health equity data to distinct geographic boundaries.3 Others present and disseminate a new metric.4 Still others aggregate local policies and laws that affect population health to guide research and advocacy.5 During the rapidly unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, many state and local health departments struggled to make data publicly available, and the Johns Hopkins University COVID Tracker quickly became the "go-to" data source for by-the-day counts of COVID-19 cases, deaths,...