PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Digital Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1658645
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Mathematical Modelling for Infectious Disease Control and PreventionView all articles
Keeping a Modeling-Driven Public Health Dashboard Relevant – Lessons Learned from the California Communicable Diseases Assessment Tool
Provisionally accepted
Mugdha Thakur
Lauren A White
John PuglieseDavid CrowPhoebe LuNatalie LintonRyan McCorvieSindhu RavuriHéctor M Sánchez-CastellanosBrent SiegelJason Vargo
Tomás M León*- California Department of Public Health, Sacramento, United States
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Researchers rapidly developed modeling-based dashboards to support the global COVID-19 pandemic response, and this output has continued for other public health responses. These dashboards are often abandoned or deprecated over time, creating challenges for public health jurisdictions that would like to leverage them for decision-making. Maintaining a relevant and sustainable dashboard requires significant effort and attention to collating modeling results and meeting local public health needs. The California Communicable diseases Assessment Tool (CalCAT), a public-facing infectious disease modeling dashboard, demonstrates the key components to sustainability and relevance: robust and flexible workflows, cultivation of trust and user engagement, wide-ranging collaboration, and content reproducibility. The experience of CalCAT's initiation and development highlights the need to be responsive to ever-changing stakeholder requests and to balance trade-offs in design choices for how modeling results are processed, presented, and shared.
Keywords: infectious disease modeling, Digital Health, CalCAT, Ensembling, California (USA), Dashboard
Received: 02 Jul 2025; Accepted: 28 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thakur, White, Pugliese, Crow, Lu, Linton, McCorvie, Ravuri, Sánchez-Castellanos, Siegel, Vargo and León. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tomás M León, California Department of Public Health, Sacramento, United States
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