Every year, more than 10 million people die from hypertension – but we can change that

In 2018, RTSL partnered with National Heart Foundation in Bangladesh to pilot a national hypertension management program. Around 30 million people in Bangladesh live with high blood pressure, but only about 11% have it under control. The rest are at risk of heart attack, stroke, and premature death.

When we started, the biggest challenge was deciding which numbers deserved to be visible. Public health dashboards are also political tools. They shape what leaders are praised for, what gets funded, and what problems are considered urgent. The numbers at the top of a dashboard become the north star for the system.

In Bangladesh, we worked with the ministry of health and public health experts to create indicator definitions that focused on patient outcomes, but also provided political leverage. As of February 2026, more than 400,000 patients are enrolled in the program. During this period, blood pressure control rates increased from 20% to 60%.

This talk uses Bangladesh to show how dashboard design influences perception and behaviour at scale.

I’ll focus on three areas:

1. Creating shared vocabulary:
Scientists, bureaucrats, and frontline health workers don’t naturally speak the same language of data. We tested and refined metric definitions and dashboard copy with both ministry officials and public health experts until the dashboard told the same story to everyone. Our goal was that a ministry official should be able to interpret and explain the dashboard as confidently as a public health expert.

2. Collecting only essential data:
In many facilities, medical officers see 100–200 patients a day. That’s roughly two minutes per patient. Realistically we can't take more than 1/6th of that time for data entry (20s). I’ll share how we decided on the bare minimum data needed to monitor program performance.

3. Making the invisible visible
Many important problems in public health stay hidden because of how indicators are defined. A small change in numerator or denominator can completely change what a decision-maker sees. And what’s visible is much harder to ignore. In Bangladesh, we worked with public health scientists to refine definitions that helped us clearly identify:

   • Patients at high risk who needed urgent follow-up
   • Patients likely to return to care if contacted
   • Emerging drug shortages

This talk is for:

• Designers building dashboards for large-scale public programs
• Entrepreneurs working in public systems
• NGOs interested in how the numbers we see shapes behaviour

Attendees will leave with:

• Ideas for how to design dashboards that influence both political decision-making and real-world outcomes
• A practical framework for choosing numerators and denominators that surface real gaps
• Principles for simplifying dashboards to build shared language across bureaucrats, subject experts and tech teams.

7.8 million patients across 7 countries are managed with an almost similar dashboard. Only difference is that some countries prefer to hide bad numbers, some are transparent, while others tweak numbers to look better.