TCC’2012 Presentation (Final: October 4 2012) Stefan Popowycz, BSc, BAH, MA

Senior Information Designer Senior Business Systems Architect

Canadian Institute for Health Information

Presentation Overview

• Who I am, what I do, what CIHI does, and why our work is important.

• Explain the CHRP solutions, the data, the challenges we faced, and detailed examples.

• Why we used Tableau Desktop and Public Premium.

• Things to remember, authors to read, questions.

Data Visualization Teaser

3 http://pinterest.com/stefanpopowycz/tcc2012-presentation/

Visualizations I created: Visualization I did not create:

Who am I

• Stefan Popowycz, B.Sc., B.A.Hons., M.A

• Trained as a Medical Sociologist, Statistician, Researcher

• Senior Information Designer / Senior Business Systems Architect

• Lead Design and Information Architect for the Canadian Hospital Reporting Project 2012 Custom Public Reports.

• Information Access & Delivery Team, Canadian Institute for Health Information

CIHI

• The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) is an independent, not-for-profit corporation that aims to contribute to the improvement of the health of Canadians and the health care system by disseminating quality health information.

• Additionally, CIHI's data and reports are provided to help inform health policies, support the effective delivery of health services and to raise awareness among Canadians in general on current research and trends in the healthcare industry that contribute to better health outcomes.

Why is our work important?

• Healthcare is extremely important for all Canadians.

• Healthcare data is used to inform decision makers on progress, overall comparison, and most importantly best practice.

• Traditionally, CIHI has had a clear obligation to analyze these data, and communicate the results to all Canadians (vision & mandate).

Why is our work important?

• However, there is a clear shift in the way people are organizing, sharing, and consuming data.

• Proper data visualizations facilitates the comprehension of complex analysis and patterns.

• But, data visualizations do not need to be boring and uninviting.

Challenges

• We needed to design a solution that was sexy, fast, inviting and easily accessible to all Canadians.

• Most importantly, it needed to be public facing. Hence our gravitation towards Tableau Public Premium.

Challenges

• Added bonus, if it was functional on a mobile platform with social media capabilities.

• Aside from great visualizations, there was a critical requirement that detailed contextual metadata (tooltips) be available for end users.

Why Tableau?

• Tableau was the only tool that allowed us to quickly create and publish data visualizations with many best practice features already inherent within the software.

• “Strong belief in better communication through visualization.” – Popowycz, 2011

• Never done before: cloud computing and aggregated health care metrics.

Why Tableau Public Premium?

• The Tableau Public Premium environment has the capacity to sustain tens of thousands of simultaneous hits.

• Proved invaluable as 10K impressions within 24 hours, 40K within 4 months.

• The 99% SLA was an important selling feature.

Why Tableau Public Premium?

• Some might question, why no server?

• Purchasing Tableau Server was too cost prohibitive at the time and Public Premium proved to be a relatively inexpensive solution for public reporting.

• Easier to convince a VP of $10K vs $180k-$220K.

• Stepping stone analysis.

Data

• Aggregated analytical datamart with accompanying dimension tables; ETL coded in SAS and exported to Excel.

• Why aggregate? Guaranteed performance within the Tableau Public Premium environment. Unknown architecture, taking a risk.

• We also had the requirement of not permitting the end user, for the time being, to download the dataset.

What is CHRP?

• The Canadian Hospital Reporting Project (CHRP) is a national quality improvement initiative providing hospital decision makers, policy makers and Canadians with access to clinical and financial indicator results for more than 600 facilities, from every province and territory in Canada.

What is CHRP?

• The public data visualizations of the CHRP project were designed with the intent to visually and interactively communicate key messages to end users using a web-based business intelligence solution.

• In essence, we wanted to create interactive infographics.

• We create two (2) categories of data visualizations.

CHRP Key Findings

• The first category of visualization we created we called “Key Findings”. Nuggets of information.

• It's summary level data, at 2-3 different levels of analysis for a specific indicator of interest, and represents an interactive approach to data presentation.

• We created two (2) clinical and two (2) financial key findings.

CHRP Key Findings

• These follow information design best practice with regards to content, colour, typography, interactivity, and design.

• Things to note: 4 key findings in total; 4 vizs in each dashboard; increasing hierarchy; all titles and heading done in Adobe Illustrator at 300 dpi; all embedding within our web ECM.

CHRP Stand Alone Solution

• The second category of data visualizations created we called “Stand Alone Interactive Solution”.

• These consist of more complex data visualizations that combine several types of data within an interactive real-estate.

• Contains guided analysis, allowing the end user to focus in on information of interest.

CHRP Stand Alone Solutions

• Layered views of the same data provides better contextual understanding of the whole message being communicated.

• Things to note: 2 complete solutions; 2 tabs, first tabs have around 5 vizs, second tab around 9; all headings and titles done in Adobe Illustrator; all embedded within our web ECM.

CHRP Key Finding Links

• http://public.tableausoftware.com/shared/6W78QWZHY

• http://www.cihi.ca/cihi-ext-portal/internet/en/document/health+system+performance/indicators/performance/chrp_ireport_findings_b

CHRP Stand Alone Links

• http://public.tableausoftware.com/shared/KWB7FMHPS

• http://www.cihi.ca/cihi-ext-portal/internet/en/document/health+system+performance/indicators/performance/chrp_ireport_financial

Tableau Desktop

Things to Remember

• Look at your data: what story do you want to tell? How will people consume this information?

• Remember that a chart is always more memorable than a table.

• Keep it simple. Less is more.

• Design, don't decorate.

Authors to Read

• David McCandless

• Manuel Lima

• Stephen Few

• Jen and Ken O'Grady

• Donna Wong

• Edward Tufte

• Nathan Yaw

• Jason Lankow, Josh Ritchie and Ross Crooks

Websites to See

• good.is

• visual.ly

• visualnews.com

• columnfivemedia.com

• thedailyviz.com

• datavisualization.ch

• pinterest.com

• printmag.com

Questions

Thanks!

• Stefan Popowycz

• Email: spopowycz@cihi.ca

• Website: www.cihi.ca

• Information Design Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/stefanpopowycz/information-design/

• TCC’2012 Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/stefanpopowycz/tcc2012-presentation/

• LinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/in/stefanpopowycz