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The display of surveillance data is an inherent exercise of power. Through the creation of a dashboard, a central authority, sometimes in conjunction with a predetermined group of stakeholders, will make determinations on what data ought to be included in a dashboard. That authority, often external to the community, becomes the arbiter of what data matter for priority setting within and across communities. Through reading dashboards, the central authority also has the power to make sense of what is happening across communities of which they are outsiders.
In public health, this exercise of dual powers is considered altruistic and accepted as it is intended to prevent or alleviate disease whereby a dashboard may serve as a guide for determining where and among whom resources should be prioritized. In this issue, Thorpe and Gourevitch (p. 889), Gleesonet al. (p. 896), and Dixon et al. (p. 900) advocate the use of health dashboards, drawing from early as well as current pandemic experience. We generally concur with their assessment but also share key considerations that temper our enthusiasm for the universal utility of dashboards.
Public health agencies have long used dashboards internally to conduct syndromic surveillance and notifiable disease reporting, and for monitoring and evaluation activities. Before 2020, the public was most frequently exposed to dashboards from consumer goods like fitness apps, car displays, financial portfolios, sports scores, video games, and home security, indoor climate, and weather monitors. However, over the past two years, publicly available dashboards chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic have become ubiquitous, a staple of news outlets and health department communications. And their growth has been fueled by availability of software platforms that can easily and rapidly visualize COVID-19 surveillance data on cases, hospitalizations, deaths, location of cases and deaths, vaccinations, and, to some extent, demographics for these metrics. To date, public-facing COVID-19 dashboards have been more widely available than for any other health condition.
There are many aspects of dashboard design that are underappreciated. While some of these are stylistic choices that are primarily meant to enhance visualization and, to some extent, data comprehension, there are other fundamental assumptions, as raised by other authors in this special section, that bear consideration: asking the right questions, blending quantitative and text-based information, audience segmentation, implications of defining...