A data analytic dashboard application to support both public health interventionists and program participants

In recent years, corporate wellness programs have demonstrated their cost-effectiveness in domains such as smoking cessation, risk factor screening, weight management, and health education. Large datasets like the Health Indicators Warehouse have a plethora of public heath relevant data to help establish standards for progress. However, more immediate and personalized information is needed to improve programs and their impact. This work explores visualization and analytic techniques to support all three phases of a sound public health intervention: assessment, intervention, and evaluation. Using aggregated participant data and formative evaluation feedback about the program, interventionists are able to assess participant progress and program impact in a dynamic and timely fashion. Demonstrated in this work are complementary dashboards to address both individual and programmatic needs. For participants, an individual-centric dashboard highlights their personal progress over time. For the program interventionist (PI), a tailored dashboard visualizes aggregate participant measures and summarizes the relative importance of various programmatic components on outcome indicators (e.g., impact of the amount of exercise on weight loss). The analytics visualized in the PH dashboard can provide immediate, formative feedback about the specific group's progress and challenges, and allow for program modification and strengthening. With a more focused and tailored intervention through this data-integrating application, the PI can better track participant compliance, health/wellness behaviors, self-reported attitudes, and relevant metrics. This work can increase participant success in reaching their health goals and assist PI's in delivering successful interventions. In summary, this application integrates data from multiple warehouses, performs epidemiologic analyses, and provides visualizations within dashboards that allow both the program participant to track their progress, and the interventionist to monitor both the group and the program. This effort is an ongoing project to capture and facilitate the full intervention lifecycle, from “data to dashboard.”