State HIV offices routinely produce fact sheets, epidemiologic profiles, and other reports from the eHARS (Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System) database which was created and is maintained by the CDC. The eHARS software is used throughout the United States to monitor the HIV epidemic and evaluate HIV prevention programs and policies. Due to limited variability of eHARS throughout the United States, software developed to analyze and visualize data using the eHARS database schema may be useful to many state HIV offices. Software developed based on the eHARS database schema could reduce the time required for analysis and production of reports.
The R software environment for statistical computing is an open source project with a thriving community of users who continue to expand R’s analysis capacity through the addition of packages. A package is “a standardized collection of material extending R, e.g. providing code, data, or documentation”. Shiny is one example of a user-developed package which easily allows R users to create interactive web applications from analytical software.
Objective
Describe the development process and function of a data dashboard for state HIV surveillance and discuss the benefits of creating interactive data dashboards in the R software environment.