Chief Data Officers look beyond dashboards

During the pandemic, governments and cities launched data dashboards to provide information internally and for residents. A panel of Chief Data Officers at the Bloomberg Philanthropies CityLab conference in Amsterdam this week discussed how they might use these tools going forward.

Louisville, KY is in the process of sunsetting its COVID-19 dashboard – in part because a mismatch in timing between data being released by the city and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was causing communication challenges.

“If our school districts, if journalists are going to be looking at the CDC dashboard, it is time for us to sunset – it’s served its purpose,” said Grace Simrall, Louisville’s Chief of Civic Innovation and Technology.

She said that cities like Louisville had put significant time and resources into improving their health insight and data infrastructure during the pandemic, including augmenting lagging indicators with leading indicators such as wastewater monitoring.

“We learned that we were really lacking in surveillance from a healthcare standpoint,” Simrall commented.

As the city dashboard is retired, she said: “We recognise there are other sources of information that continue to help serve as that canary in the coal mine leading indicator and what I’m concerned about is that as some of our funding sources have dried up and other funding sources will dry up, eventually we will be back to where we started, which is with really nothing.”

Decision tools

Justin Elszasz, Chief Data Officer for the City of Baltimore, is encouraging his colleagues to think beyond dashboards.

“At the beginning of COVID, we built countless dashboards – everyone wanted some kind of dashboard,” he said. These included public health data as well as operational information as teams worked remotely.

Many of these dashboards are now defunct or unused.

“So there is this question of how to make these things sustainable,” said Elszasz.

“I think one of the issues with asking for a dashboard in the first place is that it jumps to a solution. What we ought to be asking Chief Data Officers for is for decision support. Don’t tell us you want a dashboard – tell us you need help making a decision.”

He added: “Dashboards don’t always have the context and don’t always tell the story, and what Chief Data Officers need to help do is tell a story around the data because that’s what motivates people to change and to make decisions.”

Proactive support

Ming Tang, Chief Data and Analytics Officer for NHS England, agreed and gave a national viewpoint.

Early in the pandemic, NHS England brought together a single source of data to serve national government, local governments, health services and researchers.

Existing national health data was augmented with local data and used to record what was happening as well as target support for vulnerable people and create predictive models.

Tang said the organisation wants to “build back better” and use the approaches beyond COVID.

In addition, she commented: “What we’ve done is we’ve stopped answering questions with dashboards. We have started asking what’s the decision that you’re trying to make and what data do we need to bring together for that decision?”

To prepare for the winter, the team is creating ‘control centres’.

These are “live dashboards but very much about managing flow of patients through different systems” such as the voluntary sector, local authorities, care homes and social care.

“It’s very proactive… you’re no longer just saying here are the facts,” Tang said. “We’re actually doing something with the data. So that’s been our journey, and we’re investing significant amounts of money to take that forward.”