The Atlas decision-support workflow

Atlas is organized around a decision-support path:

DATA → SIGNALS → CONTEXT → INTERPRETATION → INVESTIGATION → PUBLIC-HEALTH ACTION

Each step answers a different question. Moving through the steps helps prevent a visually prominent value from being mistaken for a complete conclusion.

1. Data — what is available?

Atlas brings together public evidence that may include human disease, ticks and vectors, pathogens, climate, habitat, population, and scientific literature. Start by checking what the current release actually contains: source, geography, time period, update context, and limitations. A later governed source is intended to enter through a source-specific adapter and still be read as canonical Atlas evidence, with that source's provenance attached. See sources and canonical evidence.

Data availability is not the same thing as disease absence. A missing, suppressed, stale, or incomparable value must remain visibly different from a measured zero.

2. Signals — what stands out?

The application can surface geographic patterns, ranked counties, review-priority scores, and other analytical signals. A signal is a way to focus attention across many places or measures. It is not a final epidemiological conclusion.

When a signal is based on multiple inputs, review the inputs and the methodology version that produced it. Do not infer that a higher score is a probability, incidence rate, individual risk, or disease-burden estimate unless the evidence and method explicitly say so.

3. Context — what else should be considered?

Use the available One Health context to understand what may be relevant to the signal: vector or pathogen evidence, environmental conditions, population context, and related scientific evidence. Context can make a question more specific, but association or co-occurrence alone does not establish causation.

4. Interpretation — what does the evidence support?

Before writing an interpretation, check:

• Does the source cover the same geography and time period?
• Is the release current enough for this question?
• Are the measures comparable in definition, denominator, and method?
• Are any values missing, suppressed, sparse, stale, or unavailable?
• What does the methodology permit you to say, and what does it not permit?

The safest interpretation is often conditional: “This area is worth reviewing because these available signals align,” followed by the evidence and limitations that a reviewer should verify.

5. Investigation — what should happen next?

Turn the interpretation into a bounded question. For example:

• Which surveillance or laboratory records should be reviewed next?
• Is additional vector or pathogen sampling warranted?
• Does local environmental or population context change the priority for follow-up?
• Which source or time period would reduce the most uncertainty?

Record the selected geography, release or vintage, methodology, evidence consulted, and unresolved limitations so another reviewer can reproduce the starting point.

6. Public-health action — what is appropriate?

Atlas can help a team decide what deserves investigation. It does not authorize an intervention or make a public-health decision automatically. Action belongs to the responsible epidemiologists, agencies, and partners who can incorporate local knowledge, additional data, operational constraints, and applicable policy.

A repeatable review pattern

For a defensible review, use this short loop:

1. Select a supported geography or question in Atlas Explorer.
2. Scan the signal and the equivalent table or text summary.
3. Inspect evidence, provenance, methodology, and limitations.
4. Compare only measures that are sufficiently aligned in definition, geography, and time.
5. State uncertainty and distinguish missing evidence from a measured zero.
6. Write the investigation question and the next evidence needed.
7. Share the supported URL or export with the review context intact.

For the detailed boundaries behind this workflow, see What is Atlas Lyme? and Who is Atlas for?.

Where the signed-in workspace places each step

In the signed-in workspace, that path uses the six destinations:

1. Atlas Explorer holds the operating picture for the United States or one state, plus county evidence and suggested follow-up on the same address.
2. Compare holds two counties. It does not rank them.
3. Ask Atlas is the dedicated page for reviewed-literature questions when that service is enabled. It does not open a side panel.
4. Feed, Settings, and Docs stay their own destinations. Feed does not yet list items. Settings stores a default jurisdiction. Docs opens in a new tab and leaves the workspace URL on the original tab.

Share the workspace URL for the page you mean to hand off. Read the professional workspace for addresses, evidence states, and older bookmarks.