City health dashboard: Turn city data into map-based public health insight

Public health teams collect an enormous amount of information, but raw data alone rarely drives better decisions. Important details often live in separate systems, which makes it hard to compare neighborhoods, coordinate responses, or share findings with colleagues and local partners. 

Without a shared view, teams struggle to see which communities need more support. Fortunately, map-based dashboards bring that information together in a format that’s easy to interpret and act on.

City health dashboards connect public health metrics to places where people live, work, and access services. By visualizing health indicators on interactive maps, teams can compare neighborhoods and identify priority areas.

Let’s look at the core components of city health dashboards and how Felt helps teams create a collaborative digital platform for turning disconnected data into actionable insight.

What is the City Health Dashboard?

The City Health Dashboard is a strong data dashboard example. It’s a free online resource from the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. 

This dashboard helps users analyze population health across more than 1,000 U.S. cities by organizing public health data into place-based indicators. That way, you can compare local health conditions and changes all in the same platform.

Instead of treating health as a single measure, City Health Dashboard data sets highlight a range of factors shaping community well-being. These include housing affordability, air quality, and education. 

Users can zoom into neighborhood-level geography and break results down by demographics to better understand local variation. While this initiative shows what’s possible with well-structured, place-based data, it also points to a broader capability. Any public health team can build a similar experience using modern digital tools that support geospatial analysis.

What does a city health dashboard include?

City health dashboards rely on data aggregation, pulling information from open data sets and large national polls like the American Community Survey (ACS).

Health and healthcare metrics

The primary purpose of a city health dashboard is tracking how healthy a population is and how people interact with the healthcare system. It monitors health outcomes, like chronic disease rates and life expectancy, along with health behaviors like smoking, physical activity, and nutrition. Many dashboards also measure access to clinical care based on insurance coverage and the availability of primary care providers.

These indicators help public health teams evaluate current health conditions in relation to the systems that influence them. When teams view indicators in isolation, they can miss important connections between outcomes and behavior. Mapping the data makes it easier to see where health needs concentrate.

Social and economic indicators

Most city health dashboards look at social and economic factors that impact long-term well-being, drawing from open data sources and national data sets. For example, the ACS gathers demographic data on income, housing, and education at a local level. The survey even covers employment patterns and neighborhood safety to paint a complete picture of the socioeconomic landscape.

This information helps explain why health outcomes vary by community. However, tables and reports can obscure the relationship between social conditions and the physical environment. Organizing data streams by location exposes trends and patterns more clearly.

How city health dashboards visualize public health data

City health dashboards turn complex information into clear visualizations by pairing health data with geographic context. This helps people understand what’s happening, where it’s happening, and why it matters. It also illustrates the benefit of GIS in public health initiatives. 

Maps show how indicators are distributed across a city in ways that aren’t always visible in tables. Behind these visualizations, GIS enables spatial analysis so users can explore relationships between neighborhood characteristics, environmental factors, and health status. 

At a more granular level, examining data by census tract reveals which communities lack essential resources and which have greater access to healthcare services. This kind of comparison helps you benchmark performance and observe broader trends at a glance.

Charts are another part of public health data visualization that make patterns and disparities easier to identify. You can even apply filters to your dashboard to narrow results by topic, population, or geography, which surfaces insights about resource allocation.

How to build a city health dashboard in Felt

The City Health Dashboard demonstrates the power of bringing multiple data streams into a single, accessible view. Creating something similar in Felt focuses less on static reporting and more on ongoing workflows, where teams connect data, design maps, and collaborate in a shared environment. The dashboard becomes a living system that updates as conditions and data sets evolve.

Connect cloud data sources

Teams begin by linking their existing data infrastructure to Felt through cloud data sources, such as Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, or Esri services. This eliminates the need for manual file transfers by creating a direct connection between operational data systems and the dashboard environment.

Once connected, Felt treats the source as a live catalog of layers, allowing teams to add data from their databases to maps and dashboards. Felt automatically scans connected sources every 24 hours to detect new tables, views, and schema changes, while live map layers can refresh from the source on a set schedule. As underlying data sets change, those updates become available in Felt without requiring teams to repeatedly upload files or rebuild visualizations.

Build map-based dashboards

Next, teams assemble the dashboard by adding elements from Felt’s Components panel and connecting them to mapped health data sets. They can summarize key metrics with Statistics components, visualize trends with bar charts and time series charts, and add dropdown filters to explore specific geographic areas or demographic groups. These components update dynamically as users pan the map or apply filters, which makes it easier to uncover spatial patterns and population-level trends. 

Felt AI speeds up this process by translating natural language prompts into spatial analyses. A public health team can request a map of health outcome disparities by census tract from a connected warehouse, and Felt will generate the appropriate visualizations without manual SQL. You can organize, style, and toggle layers to serve different audiences, from internal analysts to external stakeholders.

Because live data sources feed these components, the dashboard remains flexible and can quickly incorporate new data sets without requiring a rebuild.

Collaborate around health data

Once the dashboard is in place, teams refine it within Felt. Through the Share menu, they can invite colleagues by email, grant view and edit permissions, and leave location-based comments on maps to discuss specific places or data points. Because maps and dashboards remain connected to live data sources, teams can quickly iterate on analyses as new questions arise.

Felt also provides granular access controls at the project and map level. This allows organizations to decide who can view, comment on, contribute to, or edit dashboard content. For broader distribution, teams can share dashboards via links and embed maps into reports, portals, and external websites using an iframe.

Keep city health dashboards connected with Felt

You need a way to connect data sources and adapt dashboards as conditions change, because without those capabilities, visualizations lose their value. Felt breaks down data silos and makes GIS more accessible for public health teams by linking maps to source data. As data changes, maps and dashboards update alongside it, helping you spend less time managing exports and more time analyzing trends and responding to community needs.

Since Felt fosters real-time collaboration, teams can explore data simultaneously and share insights from the same map-based workspace. When you need to reach audiences beyond the core team, simply share maps directly or embed them into websites, reports, and other public-facing resources.

For inspiration, you can look to examples like the Felt Gallery’s Active Wildfires in the U.S. dashboard. This resource combines live data sources with wildfire, smoke, and air quality information to provide an up-to-date view of local conditions. 

When you’re ready to create a live city dashboard, book a demo with Felt to see how connected data and collaborative mapping support your public health goals. 

FAQ

Why is GIS useful for public health initiatives?

GIS helps public health teams understand how health outcomes differ among locations and populations. By pairing health data with geographic context, organizations can spot trends and disparities and make more informed decisions about resource allocation or interventions.

What data sources can be used in a city health dashboard?

A city health dashboard brings together data from public health databases, healthcare systems, and Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) data sets. Many teams also connect cloud-based data warehouses and GIS services to keep dashboard information current, even as source data changes.

What’s the difference between a public health report and a city health dashboard?

A public health report offers a static snapshot of findings at a specific point in time, whereas a city health dashboard allows you to interact with data through maps, charts, and filters. These dashboards give you an opportunity to discover trends in the data and monitor changes as new information becomes available.