Improving Community Collaboration through Technology

Matthew Moore, Communications Specialist, Division of Public Health, City of Worcester

Matthew Moore, Communications Specialist, Division of Public Health, City of Worcester

Over two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, data-driven policy decisions and building trust with the public through transparency and communication remain priorities for public health departments. As the two principles are intertwined, the Worcester Division of Public Health (WDPH)is leveraging its existing resources and staff strengths to use technology as a communications tool in the form of a publically accessible COVID-19 data dashboard to keep its residents informed.

State and municipal data dashboards that track COVID-19 metrics have existed since the beginning of the pandemic. However, as more has been learned about the coronavirus, the types of data being reported have also changed so that relevant indicators of prevalence are better represented. This evolution has rendered some of the initial dashboards obsoleteor has caused them to become cumbersome to navigate and interpret as new numbers get added. The former was the case for Worcester’s original dashboard, which became largely forgottenby media and the public, so it was clear that we needed a refreshed tool to reflect current trends and preferred data reporting. Fortunately, the capacity and technology were already in place to make that happen.

During the Omicron variant surge inthe winter of 2021-2022, the Worcester City Manager began holding weekly press conferencesto keep residents updated on Worcester’scaseloads, vaccination progress, and policy decisions. For example, the record number of positive cases served as the impetus to maintain a citywide mask mandate, a municipal employee vaccine requirement, and expanded PCR testing capacity.

In order to gather the needed information for the press conferences, the WDPH communications staff developed a centralized system of receiving data reports directly from various sources across the city and compiling them into a spreadsheet. This included communications from:

• Hospital staff who tracked COVID-19-positive inpatients

• The WDPH Business Manager, who also serves at the city’s burial agent and records COVID-19 deaths

• The WDPH epidemiologist and a community partner who pull localized case and testing data fromthe Massachusetts Virtual Epidemiologic Network (MAVEN), which contains infectious diseases epidemiological, clinical, laboratory, and case management data

• Biobot Analytics, a wastewater epidemiology company that tests for and reports levels of COVID-19 in regional sewage as a surveillance mechanism

As the press conferences wound down with the decline of the surge, WDPH realized the need to keep sharing data with the public—the media returned to reporting county-level dataprovided by state and federal agencies, which are not an accurate proxy for what is happening specifically in Worcester. As residents took to social media to ask for continued weekly reporting, WDPH sustained its data pipeline and immediately collaborated with the City Manager’s Office of Urban Innovation to develop a new dashboard to fill the local data gap. The Urban Innovation team already had the technical knowhow to configure data tables and appropriate visualizations using Tableau Public, a data visualization software that can quickly convert the numbers entered in the existing spreadsheet into a polished dashboard.

"By including visualizations that reflect whether COVID-19 cases and wastewater levels are increasing or decreasing, viewers are better informed and can see the reasoning behind policy decisions"

When designing the dashboard, the amount of data to include needed to be balanced with readability and ease of use. Several layouts were trialed, which also had to be configured to display correctly on mobile devices. Planning involved discussions with city health officials and monitoring social media to be tapped into what local media outlets sought to report and what residents desired to know.

In particular, Biobot’s wastewater reporting has become a well-regarded indicator of COVID-19 prevalence that needed to be incorporated. Not only is virus level in sewage an accurate population-level surveillance gauge, but the rising popularity of at-home testing without users reporting positive tests led to an assumed underreportingof total positive cases.

An additional advantage that Tableau Public and other data dashboards provide is showing trends and changes over time, and not just a “moment-in-time” snapshot. By including visualizations that reflect whether COVID-19 cases and wastewater levels are increasing or decreasing, viewers are better informed and can see the reasoning behind policy decisions.For example, after launching in April, our dashboard illustrated a small springtime surge of a new Omicron variant, which led to a citywide mask advisory clearly supported by the data.

Another key aspect of our dashboard’s back-end technology is that it can be quickly duplicated to form additional dashboards for other towns in the Central Massachusetts Regional Public Health Alliance, which is led by WDPH. Specifically, we contract with Shrewsbury and Grafton to provide epidemiological services, and the Urban Innovation team seamlessly produced town-specific dashboards displaying their case and wastewater data. Each town’s Board of Health was presented with the dashboard visualizations during the recent spring surge, and they quickly followed Worcester’s lead in enacting mask advisories.

One of the biggest lessons learned for public health communications—specifically during the pandemic—is that there is no need to “reinvent the wheel.”Information travels and changes so quickly, that there is not enough time to constantly establish new processes, and existing resources can be adapted to changing situations. In this instance, WDPH leveragedalready adopted technology, reporting systems, and staff capacity to refine the city’sCOVID-19 dashboard to create a valuable communications tool that is greatly appreciated by the public.

Data Visualization