Sessions | Talks
Bangalore International Centre
30 million people in Bangladesh live with high blood pressure. Only 11% had it under control. This talk traces how dashboard design, specifically which numbers are made visible and how they are defined, helped shift that to 60% across 400,000 patients
Tony Joy
Senior Product Designer·Resolve to Save Lives
Public health dashboards are political tools. The numbers at the top become the north star for the system. They shape what leaders are praised for, what gets funded, and what problems are considered urgent. Design a dashboard badly and the right problems stay invisible. Design it well and you can shift what a ministry pays attention to.
In 2018, Resolve to Save Lives partnered with Bangladesh's National Heart Foundation to pilot a national hypertension management program. Around 30 million people in Bangladesh live with high blood pressure. When the program started, only 20% had it under control. As of February 2026, more than 400,000 patients are enrolled and control rates have reached 60%.
This talk traces the dashboard design decisions behind that shift, across three areas.
The first is shared vocabulary. Scientists, bureaucrats, and frontline health workers do not naturally speak the same language of data. Tony's team tested and refined every metric definition and dashboard label until a ministry official could interpret and explain the numbers as confidently as a public health expert.
The second is essential data only. Medical officers in Bangladesh see 100 to 200 patients a day. That is roughly two minutes per patient. Data entry cannot take more than 20 seconds. The talk covers how to decide on the bare minimum needed to monitor program performance without breaking the clinical workflow.
The third is making the invisible visible. A small change in numerator or denominator can completely change what a decision-maker sees, surfacing patients at high risk, identifying likely returnees, catching emerging drug shortages before they become crises.
7.8 million patients across 7 countries are now managed with a nearly identical dashboard. Some countries use it to surface bad numbers transparently. Others tweak definitions to look better. The design is the same. The choices around it are not.
Tony Joy is a Senior Product Designer at Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL), where he works on public health dashboards and digital systems for hypertension and diabetes programs. He helps ministries and public health teams collect and make sense of large-scale healthcare data. A lot of this work happens far away from air-conditioned offices, inside hot and busy government clinics where a single healthcare worker sees up to 200 patients a day. He has worked with the World Health Organisation, World Diabetes Foundation, University of Oslo, and multiple Ministries of Health to build dashboards used to monitor millions of hypertension and diabetes patients across low and middle income countries. He's especially interested in how data visualisation shapes incentives, priorities, and decision-making inside public health systems.