Public Health Analytics Settings
Public Health Analytics Settings is a Setup page in Salesforce Health Cloud (and Public Sector Solutions) that configures pre-built analytics dashboards designed for public health agencies.
Definition
Public Health Analytics Settings is a Setup page in Salesforce Health Cloud (and Public Sector Solutions) that configures pre-built analytics dashboards designed for public health agencies. The dashboards visualize disease surveillance signals, vaccination program performance, community health indicators, and emergency response coordination metrics. The settings page lets an admin select which dashboards to enable, configure the underlying data sources, and map the dashboards to user roles so the right people see the right metrics during the right operating cadence.
The feature sits inside the broader Salesforce Public Health portfolio, alongside contact tracing, vaccination management, case investigation, and outbreak response tools. It targets public health departments at the federal, state, county, and city levels, plus public-facing healthcare organizations that report into national surveillance systems. The pre-built nature of the dashboards is the value proposition: standing up public health analytics from scratch is a multi-quarter project, while enabling the pre-built dashboards is a multi-week one.
How Public Health Analytics Settings drives the dashboards that run a health agency
What Public Health Analytics Settings actually controls
Public Health Analytics Settings is the Setup page that turns the pre-built Public Health dashboards on or off and configures their behavior. The page lets an admin: enable or disable each dashboard individually (Disease Surveillance, Vaccination Tracking, Community Health, Emergency Response), configure the underlying data sources (which Person Accounts, Cases, Vaccination Events, Lab Results, and external feeds feed each dashboard), map dashboards to permission sets or profiles so the right roles see them, and configure refresh schedules. Changes on this page affect every user who consumes the dashboards, so changes go through standard org change management. The page is the operational front door for the analytics layer of Public Health on Salesforce.
The pre-built dashboards and what each covers
Public Health Analytics Settings enables four standard dashboard families. Disease Surveillance shows reportable conditions by area, time, and population, with drill-down into specific case clusters. Vaccination Tracking shows doses administered, coverage rates by demographic, and forecast versus actual uptake. Community Health shows social determinants of health, chronic condition prevalence, and care gap metrics by ZIP code or census tract. Emergency Response shows incident command status, resource deployment, and downstream public-facing metrics like hospital bed occupancy and emergency-line call volume. Each dashboard has multiple pages and a recommended user role (epidemiologist, vaccination program lead, community health worker, incident commander). The pre-built nature lets agencies stand up the analytics without writing reports from scratch.
Data sources and the integration surface
The dashboards read from the standard Health Cloud and Public Sector Solutions data model. Person Account holds the patient or constituent record. Case represents a reportable disease investigation or a contact-tracing thread. Vaccination Event records doses administered. Lab Result records test outcomes. The settings page lets the admin map external data sources to these standard objects through integrations: state immunization information systems (IIS) feed Vaccination Events, electronic lab reporting (ELR) feeds Lab Results, syndromic surveillance feeds aggregate counts. For agencies running multiple data sources, the page lets each dashboard pull from a specified subset rather than from everything. This is essential for compliance: federal dashboards pull only federally-reportable data, state dashboards pull only state-reportable data.
User roles, permission sets, and dashboard visibility
Public health analytics has tight role-based access requirements. An epidemiologist needs detail on every disease and every case; a community health worker needs aggregate metrics for their assigned ZIP codes only; the public information officer needs sanitized aggregates for press releases. The Public Health Analytics Settings page maps each dashboard to a permission set or profile, and the platform standard sharing model enforces visibility per record. Field-level security adds another layer for sensitive fields (specific demographic breakdowns, individual case details). Build the permission set hierarchy upfront based on the agency organizational structure; retrofitting access control after dashboards go live is significantly more painful than configuring it at enablement.
Refresh schedules, data latency, and operating cadence
Most public health dashboards refresh on a schedule rather than in real time. Disease Surveillance might refresh nightly to catch the day reportable case submissions. Vaccination Tracking might refresh hourly during a mass vaccination campaign. Emergency Response refreshes in near real time during an active incident. The Public Health Analytics Settings page lets an admin configure the refresh schedule per dashboard. Latency tradeoffs matter: more frequent refreshes give faster signal but consume more platform resources and can hit data integration source limits. Set the schedule to match the operational cadence each dashboard supports. Document the latency in the dashboard description so users know how fresh the data they are looking at really is.
Compliance, audit, and the public health regulatory context
Public health analytics is heavily regulated. HIPAA governs patient-level data access. CDC interoperability standards govern data exchange with federal systems. Each state has its own reportable conditions list and electronic reporting requirements. The Public Health Analytics Settings page integrates with Salesforce compliance features (Field Audit Trail, Event Monitoring, Privacy Center) to maintain audit trails of who accessed which dashboard and which underlying records. For agencies in regulated jurisdictions, compliance audit is not optional. Configure the audit trail at enablement, schedule periodic access reviews, and treat the dashboard access pattern as an indicator of unusual activity (a single user pulling individual case detail on thousands of patients overnight is worth investigating).
Enabling and operating Public Health Analytics dashboards
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.
Trust & references
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Public Health Analytics Settings.
- Public Health Analytics OverviewSalesforce Help
- Health Cloud OverviewSalesforce Help
- CRM Analytics OverviewSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. Who benefits most from Public Health Analytics Settings in an organization?
Q2. What type of data does Public Health Analytics Settings typically work with?
Q3. What is the primary purpose of Public Health Analytics Settings in Salesforce?
Discussion
Loading discussion…