As Minnesota families purchase backpacks and other school supplies for the new academic year, many are also thinking about the health and safety of the communities their children will return to this fall. Amid a nationwide resurgence of measles in recent years that has renewed attention to vaccination rates, a new interactive tool from the University of Minnesota (UMN) School of Public Health (SPH) and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) is helping parents, school and child care leaders, and public health officials better understand local vaccination coverage and identify communities that may be more vulnerable to outbreaks.
Developed by SPH’s Midwest Analytics & Disease Modeling Center (MADMC) in collaboration with MDH, the Midwest EpiView: MMR Coverage and Measles dashboard combines school and child care vaccination data with historical measles case information in an easy-to-use interactive map.
“One of MADMC’s goals is to partner with public health agencies to build practical tools that help them respond to real-world challenges,” said Margo Wheatley, senior research associate and manager at MADMC, who helped lead the project. “This dashboard makes important vaccination information easier for communities to understand and easier for public health agencies to put into action.”
While Minnesota has long collected this information, it was previously available primarily in spreadsheets and other static reports that could be difficult to navigate and challenging to access. The new dashboard presents the data in an interactive, visual format, allowing users to quickly explore vaccination rates by school, child care center, grade level, or geographic area.
“The goal was to make this information much more accessible,” said Ben Christianson, an epidemiologist with MDH. “It’s a tool that can be used by public health professionals and school partners, but it’s also available to anyone who wants to better understand vaccination coverage in their community.”
The dashboard includes MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination coverage for Minnesota K-12 schools and child care centers during the 2025-2026 school year, along with historical measles case data dating back to 2010. It also features a unique proximity map that allows users to identify nearby schools and child care centers with lower vaccination coverage, helping local health officials prioritize outreach when resources are limited.
The project grew out of MADMC’s summer fellowship program, which pairs University of Minnesota graduate students with MDH teams to develop practical tools that address real-world public health needs. This dashboard was initially built by an SPH biostatistics master’s student working alongside MDH’s vaccine-preventable disease experts.
The tool arrives at a time of heightened public interest in measles, as recent outbreaks across the United States have renewed attention on vaccination coverage and community protection. The U.S. recently reached its highest number of measles cases in 35 years, with much of the year—including the back-to-school season and holiday travel—still ahead. Unlike many previous years, when most U.S. measles cases were linked to international travel, the vast majority of cases are now the result of domestic community transmission, underscoring the importance of maintaining high vaccination coverage locally.
“We’ve seen larger measles outbreaks nationally this year, and there’s naturally going to be more interest in helping people understand where communities may be vulnerable,” said Emily Banerjee of MDH. “The map makes it easy to quickly explore a geographic area you’re interested in and better understand vaccination coverage there.”
Because measles is one of the world’s most contagious infectious diseases, public health experts generally recommend that at least 95% of a community be vaccinated to prevent sustained outbreaks. The dashboard helps identify areas where vaccination rates fall below that threshold, allowing health departments, school nurses, and child care providers to focus education and outreach where it may have the greatest impact.
The Minnesota version of the dashboard may also serve as a model for other states. The development team is preparing to make the underlying code publicly available so health departments elsewhere can adapt it using their own vaccination data. By sharing the dashboard’s underlying framework, the team hopes to make it easier for other states to build similar tools without having to recreate the programming and visualizations from scratch.
“We built this dashboard for Minnesota, but we also wanted it to be something other states could learn from,” Wheatley said. “By sharing the underlying code, we’re making it easier for public health agencies across the country to build similar tools and give their communities better access to this information.”
