Data Dashboards for Advancing Health and Equity: Proving Their Promise?

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, tests, and vaccinations.6 Other COVID-19 dashboards have since drawn explicit attention to COVID-19 inequities7-9 (see Table 1 for examples). [...]quantitative indicators of a dashboard's usefulness must also be measured, including visit and revisit frequency data from Web site analytics, as well as media, social media, and scientific article citations.10 Dashboards generally seek to "liberate" access to data. [...]in early 2020, the Opportunity Atlas team at Harvard University used data from private companies to add granular measures of local shifts in economic activity resulting from pandemic shutdowns.12 The City Health Dashboard added a census tract-level measure of COVID-19 local riskto guide local testing and vaccination efforts.3 Rigorous methods to measure a dashboard's actual impact on health and health equity are more elusive. The more complex a Web site is in terms of data and functionality (e.g., number of metrics, number of underlying data sources, range of geographies, comparison functions, multiyear data), the more staff time is required to ensure that all facets are updated regularly. Because of this, and because there will always be salient new and creative ways to combine data, we anticipate that health data dashboards will continue to be developed by both public and nonpublic actors, with financial support from foundation and federal agency grants.

Public Health and Public Safety: Converging Upstream

Though aspirational, such framing sends a clear message: although medical care can blunt or reverse an individual's physical and mental illness, only by adelree·sing core upstream determinants of health- from fundamental (racism, poverty) to social and envirermKmtal (peer education and housing, air pollution) causes-is progress toward im;1 1 lth at the population fevel achievable. .erthe United States temini ies to spend more on health care, and prepertionally less on addressing 1 inderlying causes of ill health, than any other wealthy country. [...]guided by local data and knowledge, resources must be allocated to catalyze measurable gains in public safety, broadly construed. The Healthcare Anchor Network is working with health care systems across the country to lend the economic power ofthe hospital sector to strengthening community health through purposeful investment in social determinants of health.