Dashboard displays and WebEOC adaptability

The ongoing response to Novel Influenza A (H1N1) is continuing to generate a lot of new data reporting and collecting requirements at both local and national level EOCs. The big advantage of WebEOC is that these boards to capture and allow local users to directly enter this data (hence reducing errors from transposing results from fax, email, phonecall) can quickly and easily be developed over a couple of hours and then continually be refined. This ongoing board development can even be done, with a bit of care*, on the production database mid incident.

Last week for example Planning and Intelligence in the NHCC identified the need to start to track several disparate pieces of information around hospital admissions and DHB staff sickness for Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and confirmed cases of H1N1. This information was initially gathered as DHB responses to a Task - Request for Information, and then as regular reporting items within their daily sitrep but it made much more sense to collate it into a table, ideally something that would show the status of all 21 DHBs 'at a glance' and perhaps be expandable to track other key indicators as they are identified. In short, for all the WebEOC administrators out there the elusive lesser spotted WebEOC Dashboard.

The actual board was a pretty basic form, that followed the standard CSS formatting of other display pages within our WebEOC board. The initial build was a little clunky:





The 'Current' and 'Cumulative' data fields were recorded above and below each other, however these data fields were sufficient to get the board 'live' and in use at the end of last week.


Following feedback from the sector the categories were extended to capture cases of ILI as well as confirmed H1N1 and two new views were created, one showing current and the other cumulative data with a 'Viewlink' between them in order to streamline the page.


The page also has filter views that allow users to view DHBs data within each of the respective Health Regions. As further categories are identified for this 'Dashboard' additional display views will be created, each accessed by a viewlink button of the main display.

There is some further work to still be done; this board currently requires the DHB to manually indicate whether they have Community Based Assessment Centres open. Now ideally that would be a 'Datalink' from the CBAC status board, but unfortunately that is a 'list' and this is a 'form' display. What that means is there is no easy way of getting rolled up data, such as the number of CBACs open, from the CBAC board to this board. To solve this Jeremy has already mentioned his favourite word, Database Trigger, but in the interim I'm afraid users will need to reconfirm this data in two places. If any WebEOC administrator out there has an idea on a solution to this please PM me.
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*I'm talking about adding new fields, adding explanatory text, re-labelling fields or re-arranging display views. I'm not talking about adding complicated java script, building SQL database triggers or anything else you wouldn't find in the plain old vanilla WebEOC Admin manual. Even then I still copy and create a back up of the current view or input that I'm about to mess with!