Modelling Information Needs and Sources in a COVID-19 Designated Hospital.

COVID-19 remains an important focus of study in the field of public health informatics. COVID-19 designated hospitals have played an important role in the management of patients affected by the disease. In this paper we describe our modelling of the needs and sources of information for infectious disease practitioners and hospital administrators used to manage a COVID-19 outbreak. Infectious disease practitioner and hospital administrator stakeholders were interviewed to learn about their information needs and where they obtained their information. Stakeholder interview data were transcribed and coded to extract use case information. The findings indicate that participants used many and varied sources of information in the management of COVID-19. The use of multiple, differing sources of data led to considerable effort. In modelling participants' activities, we identified potential subsystems that could be used as a basis for developing an information system specific to the public health needs of hospitals providing care to COVID-19 patients.

Opportunities to Improve COVID-19 Dashboard Designs for the Public.

Many organizations created COVID-19 dashboards to communicate epidemiologic statistics or community health capabilities with the public. In this paper we used dashboard heuristics to identify common violations observed in COVID-19 dashboards targeted to citizens. Many of the faults we identified likely stem from failing to include users in the design of these dashboards. We urge health information dashboard designers to implement design principles and test dashboards with representative users to ensure that their tools are satisfying user needs.