Understanding your data is a fundamental pillar of disease surveillance success. With the increase in automated, electronic surveillance tools many public health users have begun to rely on those tools to produce reports that contain processed results to perform their daily jobs. These tools can focus on the algorithm or visualizations needed to produce the report, and can easily overlook the quality of the incoming data. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is often used to describe the value of reports when the incoming data is not of high quality.

Funded by the Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, we developed the BioSINE toolset to provide visualization and collaboration capabilities to improve the accessibility and utility of health surveillance data. Investigation of public health (PH) practitioners’ needs with cognitive engineering methods revealed two key objectives: 

1. To provide analysts and decision makers with an intuitive, visually driven workspace. 

2. To support a web presence to provide rapid updating and facilitate greater interaction with data analysis in the PH community.

Given the periodic nature of influenza activity, it is important to develop visualization tools that enable enhanced decision-making. User-Centered Design is a set of software development methodologies that primarily employ user needs to develop applications. Similarly, Usability Heuristics provide a set of rules that increase the performance of user interfaces, and ease of use. We combined some of these techniques to develop FluView Interactive, a prototype that will enable users to better understand influenza information.

Objective