Speakers
Description
The Austrian Health Atlas is an open-access platform using interactive charts and maps to intuitively illustrate public health data. Developed by the Austrian National Public Health Institute (GÖG), the Gesundheitsatlas shows trends, determinants and socio-economic differences in the health of the Austrian population, offering both international and subnational comparisons.
The platform's backend is built on R within the Rhino framework, so that data scientists own the full development process. This solution is vital in a publicly financed environment with limited (IT) resources. Rather than creating separate applications for each health topic, we deployed a unified, template-driven Shiny application capable of rendering any indicator dynamically. Each user session runs in its own secure Docker/Podman container, allowing for easy horizontal scalability. Under the hood, an embedded, read-only DuckDB database provides pre-aggregated health data. A lightweight background worker regularly refreshes these data and ensures seamless data updates without interrupting active user sessions. The entire development and deployment process is automated through a GitLab CI/CD pipeline.
Content management, editorial workflows and site navigation are handled entirely by the Drupal CMS, which embeds the dynamic Shiny application via an iframe. Drupal also provides a structured API that delivers the relevant metadata for each indicator. To decouple Shiny’s rendering performance from Drupal’s response times, a background worker routinely harvests this API content and caches it in DuckDB. When a user selects an indicator, Drupal passes its ID to Shiny via the page URL, enabling the app to instantly load the correct data and visualisations.
If you used AI tools or services to support the preparation of this submission, please state the name and reason for using each of them.
Minor editorial changes done with MS Copilot
| Keywords: Please list up to 5 keywords to help us find the right session for your contribution. | RShiny, Rhino, Drupal, GitLab CI/CD pipeline, public sector |
|---|---|
| Virtual Option | This submission is for onsite presentation only |
| Video Recording | Video sharing is fine |
| The author(s) agree(s) to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the submission and is/are authorized to present it. | Confirm |
| Interested in serving as reviewer? | zuzanna.brzozowska@goeg.at |