Deployment of a National Health Risk Surveillance Dashboard: An Interactive Platform for Visualizing Cancer and Kidney Disease Trends in the United States

Abstract

The United States is faced with a great threat of increasing incidence of long term conditions like cancer and kidney diseases. Despite the wealth of data in terms of health, there is still a gap of turning that data into useful information that can be used by the policy makers, health care providers and researchers alike. The above-mentioned gap was the motivation behind the development of the interactive National Health Risk Surveillance Dashboard that will present the long-term trends in the prevalence of cancer and kidney diseases in the states of the United States from 2001 up to 2021. The study is dedicated to the implementation of a National Health Risk Surveillance Dashboard with an option to visualize cancer and kidney disease dynamics across the United States. In the country, morbidity and the leading cause of mortality and health expenditure remains chronic diseases, especially cancer and kidney disease. Public health surveillance plays a very important role in keeping track of whether or not there is disease prevalence, the populations at risk and can lead to policy making. The classical health data reporting systems are usually faulty in their data coherence, unavailability, and inability to provide interactive visualization. Providing the solutions to these problems, this paper used the United States Chronic Disease Indicators (CDI) 2023 dataset, and organized the data of years 2001 to 2021 with the aim to conduct the analysis comprehensively. The research methodology included the extraction, cleaning, and preprocessing of the data point and statistical analysis through Python and the Tableau application to allow the development of interactive dashboards reflecting longitudinal, demographic, and geographical trends. These results indicate the increasing trends of the prevalence of cancer and kidney diseases, large regional disparities, gender, and age variations along with different data confidence levels. The created dashboard is a convenient system that allows policymakers, healthcare providers, and researchers to access, research, and analyze data about chronic diseases. It can be used in making evidence-based decisions, providing assistance in public health implementation and also fostering transparent reporting of health data. Another point that the study highlights is that in future improvements of the dashboard, it might be interesting to consider integrating predictive analytics and machine learning and real-time updates to the data. The study establishes that an interactive, data-driven surveillance platform can considerably enhance the monitoring of chronic disease, resources appropriation, and creation of policies, which can help enhance the health outcomes of the country. This research recommends the constant promotion and use of these kinds of technology tools in the field of health monitoring to respond to the changing difficulties in the medical services of the United States.