How Data Visualization Is Transforming the Health Care Industry

Data viz allows the health industry to make sense of vast amounts of data for better patient care

Data visualization can drive discovery and innovation in the healthcare, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. Illustrations: Killer Visual Strategies

Efficient, meaningful data analysis is at the core of some of today’s most important medical studies. It’s also essential for physicians, nurses, and other health professionals during their day-to-day practice as they interact with health interfaces and databases, generate reports, and review patient information and trends.

But a mountain of data is of little use without data visualization. Data visualization brings the most important takeaways in the health industry into focus, helps us identify patterns and correlations, and makes data analysis more efficient.

Most people don’t need to know every detail of how a study was conducted; they need quick, actionable takeaways. That’s where data visualization can help.

For all these reasons, it’s safe to say that the health industry today could hardly survive without data visualization. In this post, we’ll dive into all the ways health care institutions are harnessing this essential medium — and offer some ideas on how you can too.

Infographics and mini-infographics

The common misconception about sharing big datasets is the more data, the better. This is certainly true when you’re conducting a medical study. When you’re sharing the results of that study, however, it’s not always the case.

When you’re publishing a paper, you’ll probably want to include complete datasets in a series of appendices. This is standard in health care and the sciences, and is done for the sake of transparency, as well as to provoke discussion.

But you might also want to include data visualizations that present key takeaways, and these shouldn’t try to visualize everything — far from it. You’ll want to highlight only the most compelling data, and represent that data clearly by making sure it’s not cluttered with other, less compelling information. Check out the infographics that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is publishing…