NOLA Dashboard

View the website: NOLADashboard.org

NOLA Dashboard was launched as a service called “The Daily Dashboard” in mid-September of 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). The Daily Dashboard was the primary means to maintain information flow between CDCs field teams engaged in data collection in New Orleans and supervising officials in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Daily field reports were compiled at the CDCs temporary headquarters at Kindred Hospital in the unflooded uptown area of New Orleans.

In addition to field reports, the Daily Dashboard reported information from the daily City of New Orleans (CNO) – Emergency Operations Center (EOC) morning briefing as well as meetings of local healthcare providers. Although it was conceived as an internal reporting mechanism of the CDC, the Daily Dashboard quickly became the primary source for local public health and recovery information within the city.

In the wake of the hurricane, the CNOs communication assets were severely encumbered and were unable to assume the information support function that the healthcare community needed. Similarly, the Health Branch and the New Orleans Health Department lacked the organizational and human resource capacity to engage in the kind of data collection and reporting necessitated by the situation.

Aware of few alternatives and recognizing a potential solution to the information crisis, the Health Branch began to communicate information to the healthcare community through the CDCs Dashboard. At the end of October, the CDCs Dashboard compiler was scheduled to rotate out of New Orleans with no replacement assigned. Consequently, she approached the Health Branch with the intention of building local capacity to support the continued distribution of the Dashboard.

The Health Branch assumed this reporting function at the beginning of November and immediately began to expand the scope of its coverage. In addition to providing information from the daily CNO-EOC briefings and meetings of local healthcare providers, the Health Branch began providing maps and listings of local health, mental health, and pharmacy services.

The Health Branch also reported on hospital bed occupancy and patient visits from data which was being compiled by a post-Katrina surveillance system of area hospitals (GNOEMS). Additionally, the Dashboard reported on patient encounter data generated from a simple clinical surveillance system which the Health Branch had established across most of the local health clinics.

Over the months that followed, the Health Branch distributed the Daily Dashboard two to three times per week and continued to report information on the recovery effort and on local health and human services to an expanding readership of state and local public health and medical practitioners.

In April of 2006, the Daily Dashboard became a weekly newsletter sponsored by Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI) and was subsequently renamed the NOLA Dashboard.