Abstract

From Book to Browser: digitising the Health of Queenslanders Report with reproducible data and reporting workflows.  

The Queensland Chief Health Officer’s Health of Queenslanders Report (CHO Report) has evolved from a static, printed, magazine-style publication into a web-based digital resource featuring interactive visualisations and dashboards. In this talk, I’ll share that journey from book to browser, focusing on the technical, cultural, and organisational aspects of moving a large, complex public health report into the digital space.

I’ll describe how the CHO production team rapidly adopted a new way of working: moving from STATA to R, embracing literate programming with R Markdown (more recently Quarto), building reusable R packages and data pipelines, standardising data structures, introducing version control, and developing interactive visualisations. Together, these changes have made it easier to manage a diverse collection of datasets, analyses and reporting requirements, while creating content that is faster to produce, more consistent and increasingly reproducible

Along the way, I’ll reflect on some practical realities of digital transformation: navigating organisational IT barriers, “moving at the speed of trust” when introducing new tools, and discovering that some processes stubbornly resist automation.

This is a practical look at modernising public health reporting in a real-world setting.