#ProjectHealthViz

History and Purpose

I’ve been working in the healthcare field, both directly as a clinician and in a managed care company, for well over a decade. While I work regularly with healthcare data at work, I quickly realized that in the larger Tableau Community, there was few examples of people using healthcare data to test their data analytic and dashboard design skills.

I realize that using unfamiliar data is an excellent way to challenge your skills and capabilities in analyzing data to find stories, but I also think that it’s important to use data you are somewhat familiar with in order to really determine if you can use a new skill, technique, design feature, or method of storytelling with the type of data you use regularly at work.

#ProjectHealthViz grew out of a need I saw in the Tableau Community. Healthcare is a huge topic around the world as costs of healthcare rise and various illness continue to see increased prevalence rates. We are all impacted by health. Health is part of being a living being. Therefore, I believe we all can be impacted by healthcare data and thus it can be interesting data to visualize.

Additionally, it’s important for me to create a community of Tableau users in the healthcare field. I’ve appreciated in the past other community members who have shared their work-related dashboards. I find it helpful to see how others are visualizing similar data as I am. This project is also an effort to create a resource for Tableau users in healthcare to seek out each other and share visualizations.

The Project Structure

There will continue to be 12 data sets – one each month. What will be slightly different, is that there are now 6 topic areas and each topic area will be assigned to two months. For 5 of these topic areas, we will provide the data, but for the Quantified Self months, participants will provide their own data. The 6 topic areas are as follows:

  • National Monthly Awareness
  • Healthcare systems
  • Diseases
  • Quantified self
  • Health equity and inequity
  • Public Health

All data can now be found directly on the Health and Healthcare Data Set page, which will have links to the data sets on Data.World. Each month the data (around the 1st) will be posted on this blog as well as on Twitter and LinkedIn.

There is a submission tracker which participants can submit their viz – feedback can be requested through this form, but participants can participate regardless of if feedback is wanted or not. We still want to record your visualization in the submission tracker viz!

How to Participate

  1. Follow me on Twitter (@ZenDollData) and/or on data.world and/or LinkedIn so you see when I post the new data.
  2. Connect to the data on data.world through Tableau or another visualization software (I don’t discriminate – use whatever software you want).
  3. Viz away!
  4. When you are done with your viz, please submit it to the submission tracker page for the month’s project. This helps so I don’t have to search through Twitter for the submissions.
  5. If you wish, post to Twitter as well using the hashtag #ProjectHealthViz and tag me in your Tweet so I’m sure to see it. I love seeing what everyone comes up with!

If you have any additional questions, please reach out!

Cheers,

Lindsay