JHU needed Graphicacy to quickly develop a preliminary version of the USDT at the end of 2025 to secure leadership’s buy-in at a January meeting. JHU and its partners also wanted to give participating states a preview of the finished product.
Instead of waiting for real data to come in, Graphicacy used placeholders to start building clear, accessible visualizations so the tracker was ready to populate.
Upon arriving on the USDT main page, users find a brief description of the overall project followed by data dashboards showing monthly case numbers for the diseases tracked. Each dashboard serves as a portal allowing users to delve deeper into a given disease.
Within the disease pages, a color-coded tile map reveals the total number of confirmed disease cases in the past 12 months. Users can filter data at the state and substate levels and for different time periods, by case totals or incidence rates. Hovering over a state brings up a callout box with specific data based on the filter’s parameters.
The next visualization, a line graph, illustrates changes in reported disease cases over time at both the national and state levels, with options for state comparisons. Finally, a bar chart highlights the proportion of disease cases by age groups over periods of either three or 12 months. Users can download all USDT charts and underlying data for their own materials.
The initial version of the tracker launched with three diseases and several states and jurisdictions actively sharing data. Graphicacy put the infrastructure in place to enable simple scaling, so JHU can easily add new states and diseases over time.
