Interactive Epidemiological Surveillance
2026-03-15
This presentation showcases an interactive module of the Infant Mortality Monitor, a tool designed for public health surveillance in Argentina.
Objective: To monitor the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) trends across different provinces.
Metric: IMR is calculated as deaths per 1,000 live births.
Data Source: Official records from the Directorate of Health Statistics and Information (DEIS - Argentina).
Interactive Stack: Built with R, plotly, and crosstalk for client-side filtering.
Document created on: 2026-03-15
Infant mortality is a key indicator of a population’s health status and the effectiveness of the healthcare system.
In Argentina, regional gaps persist between the northern provinces and the central/Patagonian regions. This tool allows for:
Real-time Filtering: Focus on specific provinces using the interactive menu.
Regional Comparison: Compare trends simultaneously by selecting multiple jurisdictions.
Signal Detection: Visual identification of outliers and sudden shifts in mortality rates.
Infant Mortality Rate by Province (Interactive) Select one or more provinces from the dropdown menu to update the chart:
The workflow behind this dashboard prioritizes performance and reproducibility:
Data Wrangling: Raw DEIS datasets are processed using the data.table package for high-speed aggregation.
Crosstalk Integration: By using SharedData, we enable interactive filtering without a backend server (perfect for RPubs/GitHub Pages).
Visualization: The plotly engine ensures that all data points are accessible via tooltips, providing a detailed view of the health indicators.
This project is part of a larger initiative to automate public health reports using R and Quarto.