Underrepresented populations on public health data dashboards: design considerations for improving usability and usefulness

Context: Representation of racial and ethnic minority groups and sexual and gender minority groups is limited on public health data dashboards. The small size of these populations leads to data being aggregated or suppressed to produce stable estimations and preserve individuals’ information privacy. This might, however, limit the usefulness of the represented data for identifying individuals’ risk factors and allocating services.

Objective: To explore public health practitioners’ concerns about underrepresented populations on public health data dashboards that emerged during a usability evaluation study.

Participants: 20 public health practitioners from New York State, US.

Setting: Virtual Zoom meetings were conducted to monitor the participants’ use of a public health dashboard and ask about their experience using it. The collected data, in the form of researchers’ notes and audio transcripts, were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach.

Results: Participants were very concerned about the underrepresentation of sexual and gender minority groups and racial and ethnic minority groups on public health data dashboards. Four themes emerged regarding the consequences of the underrepresentation: (1) misinterpretation of risk for underrepresented groups, (2) exacerbating the mistrust between underrepresented populations and the government, (3) a potential disservice to underserved populations if the data is used as the basis for allocating resources, and (4) and unknown impact for the individuals whose demographic information is unknown.

Conclusions: We propose considerations for displaying underrepresented populations on public health data dashboards to improve the utility of the represented data.