Standing up Public Health Analytics is a coordinated rollout across the Salesforce admin team, the public health program leads, and the data integration team. The four-step routine covers: enable the feature in Setup, configure the data sources that feed the dashboards, map dashboards to user roles and permission sets, and validate the dashboards work as expected before opening them to operational use. Each step needs sign-off from different stakeholders; plan the project with shared ownership and an explicit escalation path.
- Enable Public Health Analytics in Setup
From Setup, search Public Health Analytics Settings. Confirm Health Cloud or Public Sector Solutions is installed and the Public Health feature pack is provisioned. Click Enable for each dashboard you want to activate (Disease Surveillance, Vaccination Tracking, Community Health, Emergency Response). The platform provisions the dashboard metadata, the underlying CRM Analytics or Tableau dashboards, and any prerequisite reports and report types. Confirm the dashboards appear in the Analytics tab as a target user before moving on. If a dashboard fails to appear, the most common cause is missing CRM Analytics licenses or missing prerequisite data; check both before troubleshooting deeper.
- Configure the data sources feeding each dashboard
On the Public Health Analytics Settings page, map each dashboard to its underlying data sources. Disease Surveillance maps to Cases with the reportable-condition record type. Vaccination Tracking maps to Vaccination Event records (plus any IIS integration). Community Health maps to Person Account demographics plus any external census or SDoH feeds. Emergency Response maps to active Incident Command Cases plus any external resource feeds. Confirm the data sources contain the expected records by running spot-check reports against each source. Document the source-to-dashboard mapping in the Public Health runbook so future admins can troubleshoot data gaps without guessing.
- Map dashboards to user roles and permission sets
For each enabled dashboard, define which permission set or profile gets access. Epidemiologists get Disease Surveillance. Vaccination program leads get Vaccination Tracking. Community health workers get a filtered Community Health view scoped to their assigned territories. Incident commanders get Emergency Response during active incidents. Use Salesforce standard sharing model to enforce per-record visibility on top of dashboard access. Test as each target user before declaring access ready; permissions that work for the admin but block a target user are the most common source of post-launch support tickets.
- Validate dashboards and configure operational cadence
With dashboards enabled and access configured, validate that the dashboards render correctly under realistic data volumes. Spot-check key metrics against ground truth (Disease Surveillance counts should match the state IIS export; Vaccination Tracking should match the dose administration log). Configure refresh schedules per dashboard based on the operational cadence (nightly for Disease Surveillance, hourly during active campaigns for Vaccination, near real time during incidents for Emergency Response). Train the operations team on reading each dashboard and acting on the metrics. Schedule a quarterly review to refresh the dashboard configuration as program priorities shift.
- Dashboards inherit visibility from the underlying records. A user with access to the dashboard but not to the underlying Cases sees empty visualizations. Configure both layers consistently.
- External data feeds (state IIS, ELR, syndromic surveillance) can lag or fail silently. The dashboard shows yesterday data when the integration breaks; build a monitoring alert on feed freshness.
- Public health regulatory requirements vary by jurisdiction. The pre-built dashboards target the federal CDC framework; state-specific reportable conditions or aggregations may need customization on top.
- HIPAA compliance does not stop at the dashboard. Drill-down to individual records exposes PHI, so the underlying record-level sharing has to enforce the same access control the dashboard does.
- Refresh schedules consume CRM Analytics dataflow runtime. Frequent refreshes on multiple dashboards can exhaust the daily dataflow allowance for the org; balance frequency against the analytics platform quota.