Every morning, someone in your office needs to answer the same question: what does today look like? How many active cases? Which ones are overdue? What's pending in tox? Are there any unidentified decedents that need immediate attention?
Before Zeph's Daily Briefing Report, that answer required opening five different reports, cross-referencing two spreadsheets, and hoping the data was current. Now it's one click.
What's in the Daily Briefing Report
The Daily Briefing Report is a structured operational snapshot designed for shift supervisors, chief medical examiners, and office administrators. It covers everything needed to manage the day's caseload without opening individual case files.
Summary Statistics
The report opens with a period summary — how many new cases were received in your selected date range, broken down by status, manner of death, case type, and priority level. Four attention flags are highlighted at the top:
- Overdue cases — cases open longer than 30 days
- Unidentified decedents — still-open cases with no positive ID
- Pending autopsies — scheduled but not yet performed
- Pending tox results — samples submitted, results not received
These four numbers are the things that can fall through the cracks. We put them front and center so they can't be missed.
Manner of Death & Case Type Charts
Two horizontal bar charts show the distribution of manner of death (Natural, Accident, Homicide, Suicide, Undetermined, Pending) and case type across the reporting period. No separate analytics pull required — they're built into the report output.
Cases Received Table
The 12-column case table lists every case received in the date range with: case number, decedent name, age and sex, case type, manner, status, assigned medical examiner, received date, days open, autopsy status, and tox status. Rows are color-coded by triage priority:
- Yellow background — HIGH priority
- Red background — URGENT priority
- Red bold text in "days open" column — case older than 60 days
Flag badges (biohazard, decomposition, unidentified) are visible inline without opening the case.
Attention Required Table
A separate "Attention Required" table lists up to 25 open cases older than 30 days, ordered oldest first. Yellow row tinting activates at 30 days; red tinting at 90 days. This is the "things that need a decision today" section — cases that have sat too long and need escalation or a status update.
Export
The full report exports to a 25-column CSV. Every field available in the on-screen table is included in the export, making it easy to drop into Excel for custom filtering or share with county leadership without giving them system access.
How to Generate It
Navigate to Reports → Standard Reports → Daily Briefing Report. Set a date range (default: today), click Generate, and the report renders inline. It typically loads in under 3 seconds even for offices with thousands of active cases, because the API query is optimized to return only the fields displayed.
PDF output is on the roadmap. For now, the CSV export is the primary take-away format for distribution.
Who It's For
The Daily Briefing Report was designed primarily for:
- Chief Medical Examiners / Coroners — morning operational review; resource allocation decisions
- Shift Supervisors — handoff briefings between day and evening staff
- Office Administrators — FOIA-sensitive monthly reporting to county leadership
- Quality Managers — identifying process bottlenecks (cases piling up in one status)
If your office has a morning standup or weekly ops meeting, the Daily Briefing Report should be the first thing on the agenda — not a 15-minute exercise in gathering data.
The Companion: Surveillance Analytics
Where the Daily Briefing Report answers "what is happening today," the Surveillance Analytics dashboard answers "what is happening over time." The two reports are designed to be used together: the daily briefing for operational management, the surveillance dashboard for public health insight.
The Surveillance Analytics endpoint (GET /analytics/surveillance) provides manner-of-death
breakdown, drug-overdose monthly trend (an invaluable tool for opioid response coordination), and sex,
age, and race/ethnicity demographics — all configurable for 30-day, 90-day, or 1-year periods.
Access & Permissions
Access to the Daily Briefing Report and Surveillance Analytics is controlled by your office's RBAC
configuration. By default, the reports:view permission is granted to the Supervisor,
Admin, and Super Admin roles. Sensitive-case filtering is automatically applied — users without
the cases:view_protected permission will not see sensitive cases in any report output.
The Daily Briefing Report is included in all Zeph Professional and Enterprise deployments at no additional cost. If you're evaluating Zeph and want to see it in action, our demo environment includes a pre-seeded dataset that shows a realistic briefing report.