Practice Title: COVID19 Reporting using GIS Dashboard and Coordination with Public Health Communications Needs
Department: Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department
Size: Medium (Population of 50,000-499,999 people)
State: Nebraska
Summary of Practice:
Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department (LLCHD) is a local health department whose jurisdiction includes the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County in southeastern Nebraska. There are 324,514 residents of Lancaster County as of 2021. Most of the population is White (80.9%) with a significant Hispanic (7.5%), Black or African American (3.9%), American Indian and Alaska Native (0.9%), Asian (3.4%) and multiracial (8.2%) population. There is a large refugee community served by our health department from Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Vietnam eastern Europe, Sudan, Burma, Kurdistan, and Myanmar. This includes the largest group of Yazidis resettled in North America. The most common languages spoken are English, Spanish, Arabic, Kurdish, Vietnamese, and Karen.
In response to COVID-19, a public health communications methodology was incorporated by LLCHD that used a COVID-19 GIS-based dashboard application as it’s centerpiece. Around this COVID-19 dashboard, a public health communications strategy focused on risk communication (COVID-19 risk dial), associated interventions that should be undertaken, press briefings, press releases, mobilization of the Incident Command System and more, was developed and maintained. This system evolved throughout the pandemic, as did the COVID-19 dashboard application. The following submission for a Model Practice highlights the COVID-19 dashboard, primarily highlighting its role in reducing morbidity and mortality and framing the COVID-19 pandemic via public health communication practices.
The public health issue that this submission pertains to is the COVID-19 pandemic and how data about the pandemic was communicated to the public through this highly complex and prolonged emergency response. Specifically, we address how COVID-19 dashboard and risk dial were used in coordination with broader public health messaging efforts to prevent transmission and improve infection prevention behavior adoption within our community, including quarantine, isolation, and vaccination.
The department has been building capacity and resources since 2010 to be able to respond quickly to an emerging problem, assure data is available and accessible to support decision-making and provide data and communications to the public to improve their understanding of public health issues. The dashboard and risk dial are specific outcomes in the early days of the pandemic and throughout the last three years.
The goal of our COVID-19 dashboard reporting is to present information describing the COVID-19 pandemic. Specific objectives included describing the magnitude of the problem, informing, and educating the community, justifying interventions, maintaining trust & transparency, ensuring a coordinated emergency response and identifying inequities.
Some of the activities that were implemented to accomplish these goals and objectives included:
- coordination between epidemiology and geospatial information services (GIS) experts
- generating estimates from available data
- stratifying estimates to describe disparities
- engaging with community leadership
- adjusting dashboard reporting
- regularly reviewing existing reporting
The dashboard planning started in February 2020, released in April 2020, the risk dial related to it was released May 2020, vaccinations added December 2020 and an array of public health communications occurred throughout. This timeline of milestones and outcomes are further described in the ‘Local Health Department and Community Collaboration’ section of this submission.
Project objectives were met successfully through this model practice. How these were met is further described in the following sections of this submission.
The specific factors that led to the success of this practice include:
- engagement with other city departments & community partners to identify data needs
- maximizing situational awareness with community stakeholders & partners
- reviewing data reported with partners to ensure the reported data meets their needs
- maintaining and expanding epidemiology capacity at LLCHD
- strong support & clear communication by government officials
Public health impact examples of this dashboard meeting the objectives are below.
- Ensuring key stakeholders in the community are well-informed and take action to prevent transmission or reduce the burden of severe disease was a major result of the COVID-19 dashboard.
- Increasing trust and confidence in public health that contributed to increased engagement with LLCHD on not only COVID-19 response efforts, but other projects related to improving public health efforts, such as community surveys and focus groups to drive the Community Health Assessment process, was clearly communicated by a broad array of partners.
- Speaking of these partners, strengthening partnerships between LLCHD and key community partners and city and county leadership by keeping them well-informed and adapting our reporting practices to their identified needs led to an increased adoption of public health practices and well-coordinated interventions.
- Identifying inequities allowed LLCHD and community partners to focus efforts on reducing those inequities. This included increasing testing availability where cases were being identified less and possible under-ascertainment of cases was occurring, increasing prevention recommendations in communities where cases were being identified more and increasing vaccination promotion events in communities with lower traditional vaccination rates.
Community engagement in the COVID19 dashboard included: city/county executive leadership, city/county departments with GIS expertise, public health communication leadership, healthcare system leadership, emergency response team/ICS command staff, and general community feedback.
The steps taken to reduce health inequities were driven by information shared in our reports. Data gathered showed geospatial variation and identified communities with inequities. Some inequities identified geospatially displayed race, ethnicity, age & sex to identify disparities. Data on income, education, employment, and a range of other factors were considered when working to identify interventions reducing disparities. Disparity information allowed community members to develop age, sex, race, ethnicity, and geography-based interventions. For example, the following interventions were undertaken.
- Testing practices that improved case-ascertainment rates in the community and allowed interventions such as quarantine, isolation and contact tracing/case investigation to prevent the increased transmission.
- Vaccination campaigns focused on neighborhoods with lower vaccination rates. These ensured that communities with lower vaccination rates had increased access.
- Vaccination campaigns in coordination with school systems to increase access to youth & families who had barriers to access due to language, location, and other factors.
- Vaccination campaigns in collaboration with Cultural Centers of Lincoln and leaders of racial/ethnic communities to promote vaccinations and reducing barriers to vaccination.
The COVID19 dashboard can be accessed at covid19.lincoln.ne.gov, or by visiting health.lincoln.ne.gov
COVID19 Reporting using GIS Dashboard and Coordination with Public Health Communications Needs
Category
Epidemiology
Description