In British Columbia, ArcGIS Dashboards unify the pandemic response

It’s as important now as it was at the beginning of the pandemic for public health decision makers to act quickly and collaboratively. These rapid decisions depend heavily on up-to-date, standardized and democratized data. Up-to-date case counts, recoveries, hospitalizations and ICU capacity, and vaccine coverage are all essential for COVID-19 situational awareness and response. Most importantly, these insights should be made openly accessible to the public to foster trust and participation in health policy changes.

Dashboards for a simplified, efficient response

The BC COVID-19 Dashboard Project, explained more deeply in the following video, leverages multiple interdependent ArcGIS Dashboards to help more efficiently monitor, evaluate, and respond to COVID-19 activity across the entire province. The Project is a collaboration between British Columbia’s Health and Natural Resource teams with their partners to integrate information and spatial data.

One small step in technology adoption can be a huge leap in building public health capacity

British Columbia’s approach identifies three ways that health authorities can leverage GIS platforms to build capacity for COVID-19 response and other public health emergencies.

1. Coordinated effort in the timely collection, standardization and integration of data

During emergencies, demand for data is daily, urgent and critical. When teams are empowered with tools that operationalize data ingestion, standardization, and visualization in an agile manner, more time can be spent thinking about timely, evidence-based decisions on resource allocation. Location-based risk assessments not only help stakeholders identify where to prioritize action but helps provide context on how to provide support to the communities that live in those locations.

2. Collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams across organizations

Pandemic response is all about time: the earlier we can identify hot spots and the location of those hot spots, the faster we can develop an intervention strategy and allocate resources appropriately. Timely, evidence-based decisions are often cost-effective decisions because delays in response are expensive. Data dashboards can act as a single source of truth during epidemics and other significant health events that enable multi-disciplinary teams to quickly discuss patterns and insights, collaborate on the response strategy, and define a coordinated plan of action among various institutions.

3. Civic engagement and public participation in pandemic response

Transparency is essential to gain and uphold public trust in the government’s public health decision making and actions. Authoritative, openly accessible and mobile map-based dashboards can be motivating and intuitive engagement tools that help members of the public relate to epidemic activity in their neighbourhood and connect compromises in their lifestyles with observed reductions in epidemic activity. As mentioned in the video, one of the most important benefits of the BC COVID-19 Dashboard Project was the ability to support British Columbians’ commitment to follow public health orders and in turn help flatten the curve.

Want to know more about how your team can integrate ArcGIS Dashboards or other GIS tools to make your public health workflows faster and more efficient? Contacts us at publichealth@esri.ca.

For more information on Esri Canada’s new Public Health program, check out esri.ca/health.

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.