June 16, 2023 3:00 a.m.

Oregon Health Authority has launched a new, interactive data dashboard that will allow people to monitor trends for the most common summer-related hazards.

An OHA release said the Oregon ESSENCE Summer Hazard Report dashboard was launched last week by OHA’s Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention Section. It contained interactive graphs showing total daily counts of emergency department and urgent care visits in Oregon associated with four injury and illness categories. Those are: heat-related illness, water submersion events, wildfire-related smoke inhalation and air quality-related respiratory illness.

Dr. Tom Jeanne, deputy state health officer and epidemiologist at OHA said, “Injuries such as heat-related illness and smoke-related respiratory distress are, unfortunately all too common now as climate change-related threats have become the new reality in Oregon”. Jeanne said, “We need to monitor ESSENCE data so we can anticipate when and where resources will be needed to help us adapt to these events”.

The release said the summer hazards dashboard allows users to hover over a section of the interactive graphs in each category to view the number of emergency department or urgent care visits by date in a given year. Users can also select data sets by year, going to back to 2018. The dashboard page under each tab also contains a description of the injury or illness, the groups most at risk, and how it can be treated or prevented.

The dashboard is linked: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/oregon.public.health.division.acute.and.communicable.disease.pre/viz/ESSENCESummerHazardReport/Intro?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery