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Benefits
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Knowledge dissemination |
“I think it’s a terrific dashboard. I love the way that the information is on there. I think it really captures every aspect of what we’re seeing on the street” (Ohio). “Our subcommittee particularly likes to see in the slides [from dashboard data] what’s going on month by month. We usually give them an overall of how many [naloxone kits] we’ve distributed in total, but they also like to see how we’re trending. So that’s basically been our main use of it” (Kentucky). “When you dive into the data dashboard, I would say that the biggest use for it has been just displaying any recent data we have pretty much on a quarterly basis, and that mainly happens at subgroup meetings” (Massachusetts).
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Decision-making tool |
“[Deidentified person] can speak more to how data impacted our strategies. She was really helpful in the sense that like, she would give us the data, we would identify the issue, and then I would take that and talk to our partners to figure out how to move forward, but I wasn't the one really digesting it, pulling the stories from it” (New York). “Yes, I do believe that it definitely helped when it came to those decisions because it helped the entire coalition know certain areas that needed extra help and what kind of help that they needed. It also helped us form...helped us do the problem solving in the original start of this coalition” (Massachusetts). “Because it helped us choose...There’s 10 strategies that you could have chose, but by looking at the data that’s available on the dashboard, then you say, ‘All right, these are the ones that we need to tackle here in our community, because it’s right here in front of our face. These are the important ones’” (Kentucky).
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Access to more data |
“So, we don’t see the practical application of this portal, but the information is on there. How to access it is, in my opinion, absolutely suited for any organization that would need that data that they don’t have access to normally” (Ohio). “But the Medicaid data, we never access that as the health department. I’m not entirely sure why but it’s a really helpful data source for us to be able to use because we serve a lot of, you know, medically underserved population. So, being able to have access to those numbers does help” (Ohio). “I got that from the dashboard, because I think that our sense was that there was more naloxone available than there probably was because there’s so many other sources now. I mean, it’s not just coming from harm reduction...And then we were trying to identify what was behind it because we were seeing that naloxone was a huge factor in deaths being down. I mean, that was something we had to really make sure was occurring. And if there was a distribution site, as it were, that was sort of flailing a little, we wanted to do something about that. So, that information came from the dashboard. I did not have a sense of that from the community” (Massachusetts). “[L]ike residents receiving buprenorphine. I don’t know where you’re getting that information, prescription drug monitoring programs. I wish we could get that like firsthand, but this is great to look at because I don’t get that data. And it’s current as of 2021” (New York).
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Drawbacks
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Time constraints |
“[G]iven COVID and everything that happened we just didn’t have [data] available, and the timeline really just didn’t align with decision-making, and I think that is just a fundamental issue with the study, like we talked about, but I do think that that makes it challenging” (Massachusetts). “Particularly since we’ve been working out of the office, there’s greater demands of people’s time and lower bandwidth available” (Kentucky). “But this has also just been a unique for us Wave 1 folks, a unique time, given the pandemic and everything. We have so many other things too...that are not typical. That some of the HEALing [Communities] Study...has just been a little bit extra so it’s just been kind of a hard time...” (Ohio).
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Misalignment of the dashboard as a tool |
“So, I would say that in [deidentifed community], a lot of it is redundant. They already have access to this data. It’s already in a location where they feel comfortable going and know how to go to. So, they don’t want to use something new. If they don’t have to” (Ohio). “I think, you know, had we had it earlier, I think it would have been easier to incorporate it into the coalitions. I think now it’s just trickier” (New York). “We did not use the data from the dashboard largely because, I think, everyone around our virtual table already knew all the data from our community dashboards and understood. Everyone is there because they work in this space, and so they understand exactly where the trends are, where the issues are, and so forth” (Kentucky).
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Disutility of data |
“I think the factor is that the data is just so lagged, and the information that we need to work off of, we just need something way more current than what’s available...It’s just -- the data is just not very useful for us right now, unfortunately” (New York). “The problem is much bigger than what the numbers from [deidentified agency] can show us and so when we’re looking at it that way, it’s better to get that real time data from each other rather than rely on HCS to get old data that we’ve kind of already gone through” (Ohio). “Well, we’ve looked at the data, but I think we haven’t really used it, and the reason is two-fold. One, it’s too soon to be able to see much of an impact on the practices. We’re still rolling some of them out. And secondly, COVID, that has screwed up all the data, and we don’t, at the moment, have a good way to separate the impacts of the pandemic isolation and so forth from changes in practice in our community. Everyone right now is just kind of, with what’s going on, doing the best we can. We can’t read the data to detect impact of anything that we’re doing right now” (Kentucky).
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