Leveraging GIS Technology to Mitigate the COVID-19 Pandemic
Operation Dashboard & Hub
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic presents an almost unprecedented challenge for the health systems. It poses incredible strains on the public health infrastructure, highlighting major limitations of information and technology including how "big data" are collected, processed, shared, and visualized for a diverse group of audiences across multiple platforms.
Problems
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Research, Assessment, and Planning (RAP) unit compiled relevant metrics for vital decision-making regarding the health and safety of San Bernardino County (SBC) residents to the Department of Public Health (DPH) executive team. This process was time and labor-intensive, consisting of creating and presenting various reports independently on a regular basis. These initial metrics and reports compiled by RAP unit lacked accessibility to the general public and the ability to present timely data.
Objectives
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, it became apparent that there was a fundamental need to stay updated on COVID-19 statistics and data. It was important to facilitate effective public policy decisions and address a shared problem among intergovernmental agencies and other stakeholders with the most currently available data. There was also a need to streamline and automate the reporting process to improve efficiency.
The creation and evolution of the COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard were born out of an inherent need to provide essential COVID-19 data to county leadership, stakeholder organizations and residents and facilitate informed and data-driven decisions in combating the spread of COVID-19 and mitigating its effects on the residents of San Bernardino County.
By utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, the RAP team created a fully interactive public-facing COVID-19 Dashboard and Hub pages with the goal to present large volumes of up-to-date data for ease of comprehension. This approach reaffirmed, as a core value, our agency’s commitment to data transparency and integrity.
Timeline
The timeline (right) highlights major events that guided the team's decisions to implement changes to the program/platform.
Dashboard/Hub Iterations
Dashboard Version 1.0
The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the County was reported on March 15, 2020. As the transmission rate increased, California State Governor Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency.
At the outset of the pandemic response in March, data was manually entered and uploaded from various reporting sites. These simple online visualizations displayed confirmed COVID-19 cases, patients tested, number of negative tests, percentage rate of COVID-19 positivity and COVID-19 deaths. This early iteration of the dashboard was characterized as being analog in its application.
Dashboard Version 2.0
By the beginning of April 2020, there was a push to increase the capabilities of the dashboard by upgrading the information content and the visualization from within the RAP unit.
Up until this point, the Communicable Disease Section (CDS) pulled data from the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE), which provided the RAP data team with Situation Reports (SitREP) in PDF format. This data was then converted and entered into Smartsheet, a collaboration platform that incorporates task automation.
The RAP team then created a command script using Python programming language to pull data from Smartsheet automatically and export it into an ESRI GIS environment for visualization on the Operation Dashboards. The immediate benefit of this process improvement resulted in:
- Increase in data input from diverse data sets
- Increase in simultaneous data upload capacity
- Greater visualization potential
- Ability to explore metrics of growth, trends, and forecasting
By the end of May 2020, HTML tables were added to the dashboard. This addition provided improved visualization within a web browser. As a result, the tables were able to provide a more granular view of region-specific testing, case and death data within our county.
Hub Pages
Over the next few months, community stakeholders began vocalizing their need for constituency-specific COVID-19 data. With more content added to the COVID-19 Public Dashboard, there was a concern of content overload within a single page, compromising the performance of the dashboard, as well as loading time due to the addition of multiple tabs.
The challenge, therefore, was to maintain a user-friendly, interactive experience while still providing accurate and timely information.
The RAP team sought to remedy this problem by simplifying data into manageable content pages. As a result, the COVID-19 Hub was launched to replace the standalone dashboard.
The COVID-19 Hub is a website-style platform that organizes and presents COVID-19 data in the form of interactive key metrics, lists, charts, tables, and maps, accompanied by a definition of terms, in themed pages and dashboards.
The introduction of the COVID-19 Hub gave the end-user the ability to seek an at-a-glance view of the COVID-19 data or a more granular dynamic picture should the user seek out data specific to a certain sub-group. The format expressly met the need for timely updates of the progression of the pandemic within our county. There was a provision added to provide definitions of terms and phrases often utilized in the epidemiological sphere. This attention to detail succeeded in establishing a more user-friendly dashboard.
Results
The County COVID-19 Hub and Dashboards have been the central source for information surrounding the pandemic for the general public, local officials, media outlets, health care facilities and other key stakeholders. From the COVID-19 Dashboard’s launch in March 2020 to February 2021, there have been nearly 4 million views with an average of about 10,000 views per day. Additionally, the mobile version, which enabled further access to the data, amassed nearly 2 million views with an average of 5,000 views daily. The latest version, a Hub site with standalone pages detailing the relevant COVID-19 metrics, has over 70,000 views since its launch in late January 2021.
Due to a refined, semi-automated updating process, the Hub and Dashboards are published daily including weekends and holidays. With one staff member, this task takes no more than two hours. With assistance from other team members, the updates can be completed well under an hour. Without the semi-automated approach of pulling data and the process of consolidating multiple reports by manually upload data online, it would take a staff over eight hours to update the dashboard. In streamlining this process, the amount of maintenance and constraints on staff were significantly minimized, while maximizing the efficiency and creativity of the team to endeavor in other projects.
The modular architecture of the workflow also granted the team flexibility to incorporate additional metrics needed for a growing, ever-changing COVID-19 response. For example, when Contact Tracing activities and vaccinations began, the County needed additional metrics, we were able to quickly incorporate information from new data sources which can be displayed in the next iteration of the Hub and Dashboards.
Conclusion
The Dashboards and Hub pages have provided county leaders and various stakeholders the data and the tools required to make informed decisions about the health and safety of the community. By providing timely, robust, and actionable measures, limited resources can be deployed to combat the pandemic in the most effective and equitable manner. Such assimilation of data to inform policies allows decision-makers to be flexible and adaptive in their responses and hone in on specific areas of the pandemic.
