Lessons Learned From Developing Dashboards to Support Decision-Making for Community Opioid Response by Community Stakeholders: Mixed Methods and Multisite Study

Abstract

Background: Data dashboards are published tools that present visualizations; they are increasingly used to display data about behavioral health, social determinants of health, and chronic and infectious disease risks to inform or support public health endeavors. Dashboards can be an evidence-based approach used by communities to influence decision-making in health care for specific populations. Despite widespread use, evidence on how to best design and use dashboards in the public health realm is limited. There is also a notable dearth of studies that examine and document the complexity and heterogeneity of dashboards in community settings.

Objective: Community stakeholders engaged in the community response to the opioid overdose crisis could benefit from the use of data dashboards for decision-making. As part of the Communities That HEAL (CTH) intervention, community data dashboards were created for stakeholders to support decision-making. We assessed stakeholders' perceptions of the usability and use of the CTH dashboards for decision-making.

Methods: We conducted a mixed methods assessment between June and July 2021 on the use of CTH dashboards. We administered the System Usability Scale (SUS) and conducted semistructured group interviews with users in 33 communities across 4 states of the United States. The SUS comprises 10 five-point Likert-scale questions measuring usability, each scored from 0 to 4. The interview guides were informed by the technology adoption model (TAM) and focused on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, intention to use, and contextual factors.

Results: Overall, 62 users of the CTH dashboards completed the SUS and interviews. SUS scores (grand mean 73, SD 4.6) indicated that CTH dashboards were within the acceptable range for usability. From the qualitative interview data, we inductively created subthemes within the 4 dimensions of the TAM to contextualize stakeholders' perceptions of the dashboard's usefulness and ease of use, their intention to use, and contextual factors. These data also highlighted gaps in knowledge, design, and use, which could help focus efforts to improve the use and comprehension of dashboards by stakeholders.

Conclusions: We present a set of prioritized gaps identified by our national group and list a set of lessons learned for improved data dashboard design and use for community stakeholders. Findings from our novel application of both the SUS and TAM provide insights and highlight important gaps and lessons learned to inform the design of data dashboards for use by decision-making community stakeholders.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04111939; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04111939.

Keywords: dashboards; data visualizations; human-centered design; overdose epidemic; public health.