Power BI dashboards for public health departments
Most health departments already own the tool. If your county or your state runs Microsoft 365, Power BI is sitting in the tenant, paid for, and the one person who could build something in it is already spending the week assembling a grant report by hand. So the quarterly measures still get stitched together from four workbooks, and a question about how many clients a site served last month takes two days.
Blue Peak Data Consulting builds those dashboards for county and state health departments and the federally funded programs they run. A written scope, your data staying in your own Microsoft tenant, and the finished file handed over so your staff can change it without calling us.
What gets built
A first project is usually one or two of these rather than all of them.
Program outcome dashboards
Clients served, services delivered and outcomes by program, site and period, on one definition instead of four.
Grant performance measures
The measures your award requires, calculated once and reported the same way every period. When the funder report and the board packet disagree, this shows you where.
Community health indicator reporting
Indicators over time by geography and population, ready for a community health assessment or an improvement plan update, with the source and vintage of each shown.
Clinic and program operations
Appointments, caseload, missed visits, staffing and throughput by site, refreshed on a schedule instead of pulled by hand before a meeting.
Communicable disease and immunization reporting
Counts, coverage and follow up timeliness, built from the extracts your surveillance and registry systems already produce. Aggregated views by default.
WIC, MCH and similar program reporting
Participation, caseload and service counts in the shape your program reporting requires, from the extracts your staff already pull. We build to your definitions.
Where the data comes from
State registry and surveillance extracts
A scheduled extract, a flat file, or a reporting view your state system already provides is enough. No live connection into a registry is needed.
Program spreadsheets
The workbooks your program staff already maintain are often the fastest source of truth, because they encode counting rules that live nowhere else.
Grant and funder portals
The numbers you already submit upward. Reconciling what was reported against what was counted locally is usually the first thing a dashboard gets asked to do.
Clinical system exports as flat files
We take an export, not a connection. We will not claim familiarity with an electronic health record we have not worked in.
What we do instead is read your export, ask about every ambiguous field, and write down what each one means. That data dictionary is a deliverable, and it keeps the reporting running after the person who knew everything leaves.
Discovery
We read your export, list the fields, and agree what the first dashboard has to answer, starting with the reporting you are already obliged to produce. You get a written scope and a written quote before anything is signed.
Solution design
The measures get defined once: what counts as a client, what counts as a service, when an encounter falls inside a reporting period, which denominator a rate uses. Definitions live in the model, not in each report page, which is why the numbers stop disagreeing.
Implementation
Report pages get built against your real data and reviewed with you as they go, not presented for the first time at the end.
Optimization and handoff
Two to four weeks of tuning after the first release, then you get the .pbix file, the documentation, and a working session with whoever will maintain it. The model is yours, and if you never call us again everything keeps running.
Privacy and the HIPAA boundary
Your data stays in your environment
Reports are built and published in your department’s own Microsoft tenant. Nothing is copied to a Blue Peak server and nothing goes to an outside service.
Row level security
A site lead sees their site, a program manager sees their program, leadership sees everything, and a public view carries no record level detail. The rules are documented so your IT can audit them.
Small counts get suppressed
Anything leaving the department is aggregated and de-identified, and the small cell suppression rule is agreed at discovery and enforced in the model rather than remembered by whoever exports the file. A public facing view is its own deliverable with its own review.
The HIPAA boundary is respected
We would rather work from de-identified or aggregate extracts, and for most public health reporting that is enough. Where identifiable data has to be in scope, it runs on your terms: an account your IT issues inside your own tenant, whatever business associate agreement and training your privacy officer requires, and a minimum necessary field list agreed before anything moves.
How the work is priced
Every engagement is quoted from a written scope, and each phase is its own purchase.
We do not print a number here, because an honest one depends on how many sources have to be reconciled and how many definitions are contested. You get a written quote against a written scope, with a delivery date, before anything is signed.
Each phase is its own purchase. You buy the first dashboard, see it working, then decide whether there is a second one. No annual license, no hosting fee, no seat count. If your department already has Power BI through Microsoft 365, there is usually nothing further to buy.
A first dashboard normally runs three to eight weeks from the day we have your export, and the clock is usually set by how quickly your IT can produce a clean one.
What your purchasing office gets
Each phase is its own written scope, its own acceptance and its own invoice. If your office needs a quote with a statement of work attached, a sole source justification, or a cooperative vehicle, it is yours. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business that works with public agencies, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5.
Who does the work
Blue Peak’s senior team leads every build, and the consultant who scopes your dashboard is the one who builds it. Our lead consultant brings twelve years in production analytics, most of it in Power BI, SQL Server and the Microsoft stack.
That consultant led reporting on a $30M multi jurisdictional federal initiative from 2019 to 2022, integrating grantee data across jurisdictions and producing grant compliance reporting that passed federal funder review. From 2022 to 2024 the same consultant built dashboards and operational reporting for a health system’s laboratory operations.
That record was earned before Blue Peak, so we describe it as our people’s experience rather than the firm’s past performance, on purpose. What you get is the people who did that work, with no junior handoff.
See the build quality first
There is a working demo on this site: the interactive grant command center. Spend, burn rate and compliance deadlines on synthetic data. Judge the build quality in a minute, and see also the public safety demo on published Olathe, Kansas police data.
Questions health departments ask
What can you build from the data we already have?
More than most departments expect. A scheduled extract from your registry or clinical system, the workbooks your program staff maintain, and the figures you already submit to a funder are usually enough for a first dashboard. We do not need a live connection into a state system to start, and on a first project we do not ask for one. If the data genuinely will not answer the question you want answered, we will say that in discovery rather than after the invoice.
Where does our data live, and does it leave the department?
It stays in your environment. Reports are built and published in your department’s own Microsoft tenant, never copied to a Blue Peak server and never sent to an outside service for processing. Row level security controls who sees what, and the access rules are documented so your IT staff can audit them.
How do you handle protected health information?
We would rather not hold it. Most public health reporting is counts and rates, so we work from de-identified or aggregate extracts wherever that answers the question. Where your department decides identifiable data has to be in scope, it runs on your terms: an account your IT issues inside your own tenant, whatever business associate agreement, training and access review your privacy officer requires, and a minimum necessary field list agreed before anything moves. If policy rules out an outside account, exports you choose and control are enough.
How do you keep small numbers out of a public report?
The suppression rule is agreed in writing during discovery and then built into the model, so a suppressed cell stays suppressed in every view, every export and every scheduled refresh. Anything published outside the department is aggregated and de-identified. A public facing view is always its own deliverable with its own review, never an internal report with the sharing settings changed.
Do you know our electronic health record or our state registry?
We will not claim familiarity with a system we have not worked in. What we do is take a flat export, read it field by field, ask your staff about every ambiguous column, and write down what each one means. That data dictionary ships with the dashboard. In practice the export is the part that matters, because your definitions live in your staff’s heads and your workbooks, not in the vendor’s documentation.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
Every engagement is quoted from a written scope, and each phase is its own purchase. You buy the first dashboard, see it working, then decide whether there is a second one. There is no annual license from us, no hosting fee and no seat count. A first dashboard normally runs three to eight weeks from the day we have your export, and the clock is usually set by how quickly your IT can produce a clean one.
Who owns the dashboard when the work is finished?
You do. Handover includes the .pbix file, the semantic model, the documented measures and a written description of every source field. Your staff can open it, change it and republish it without us. There is no hosted product to keep paying for and no code held back. If you never call again, the reports keep refreshing on the schedule they were built with.
Do you work outside Kansas?
Yes. Blue Peak is based in Olathe, Kansas, works across the Kansas City metro and Missouri, and delivers remotely beyond both. The build happens inside your tenant, so distance changes nothing about the work. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5, and will complete whatever vendor registration your state or agency requires before an award.
Related pages and working demos
Send one line: the report you hate producing
Email sergei@bluepeakdataconsulting.com and name the recurring report that costs your staff the most time. The quarterly performance measures, the community health assessment refresh, the clinic numbers a program manager asks for every month. One line is enough.
You get an honest read back within one business day: what it would take, roughly what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all. If your own analyst could build it in an afternoon, we will say so.