The Heat-Related Illness and Mortality Dashboard is the first tool from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health designed to quantify the local impact of extreme heat through regularly updated data.
"The most important thing for us is that people understand that high heat leads to illness, and it's important to see how easily people can become ill and how many become ill," Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.
According to county health officials, the dashboard will provide weekly updates on emergency room visits related to heat illness and monthly updates on heat-related deaths.
"Once a month, we'll be able to update the numbers to people who die, tragically, due to heat-related illnesses," Ferrer said.
The dashboard is intended to serve as a near real-time resource during the hottest months of the year. In addition to tracking heat-related emergency room visits, it includes daily temperature information and identifies areas of the county experiencing the greatest impacts.
Health officials said the tool also breaks down which populations are most affected by extreme heat, providing information that can help guide outreach efforts.
"We work very closely with the Medical Examiner to make sure we're capturing heat-related deaths, and we take that information and try to display it in a way for people that's easy to understand and read," Ferrer said.