A Short Exploration of Physician Practice EHR/EMR Adoption

According to recent estimates by the CDC, the use of electronic health and medical records in physician offices continues to climb.   According to data from the November 2011 NCHS Data Brief, around 57 percent of office based physicians report using some kind of electronic health/medical record system and around 34 percent report having a system […]

Bridging the Dashboard Communication Gap

The term “dashboard” provides a convenient metaphor because everyone has at least some idea of what a dashboard looks like – and therein lies the problem: our own idea of a dashboard may differ wildly from someone else’s idea of a dashboard.  When people talk about dashboards, there may be a huge communications gap and […]

Double Take on Dual Axis Graphs: Part III

This quick follow-up on dual axis graphs shows another take on their potential use.  The first suggestion comes from Naomi Robbins in her book “Creating More Effective Graphs.” 1 She suggests that dual axis graphs may be useful to represent data in different – but equivalent – measurement units such as Centigrade (Celsius) and Fahrenheit.  […]

Dual Axis Graphs: Are They Useful?

I have to admit that even after reading Stephen Few’s article on dual axis graphs, I am not quite ready to rule them out entirely.  As is so often the case with data visualization, what we use depends on what we’re trying to do.  I agree with Joe Mako and Stephen Few that, when used […]

Mixed Metaphor: Line Graph + Bar Chart

Many charting tools allow us to combine bar charts and line graphs in the same graphic – but should we?  This question came up when I did a double take the other day while reading a market research report.  In order to focus on function rather than content, I have re-created a similar graph below:

How Three Graphs Can Tell Us Where to Focus our Attention

A while back, SEO guru Glenn Crocker and I were talking about how visual analytics can help with search engine optimization.   Getting useful SEO information usually requires crunching data for thousands of links, so it’s quite useful to have something that takes us from a quick overview to the interesting details.

To illustrate how visual analytics […]

Don’t be Fooled by Poor Analytics

Today’s shrinking resources may tempt us into rushing things along, yet we need to be careful when relying on graphics to make decisions.  Good graphics make their point more quickly than a wall of text.  On the other hand, poor graphics easily create the wrong impression.  Distinguishing between the two is not as easy as […]

Beware of Creative Analytics: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

How often have we seen a graph in an opinion piece without knowing how it was created, but somewhere in the back of our mind we suspected that it was tweaked somehow to make a point? How can we ferret out “creative analytics” from the true story? Remember Mark Twain’s famous quote about […]

Tableau Public: Interactive Obesity Data On The Web

The viz below uses Tableau Public and allows visitors to explore differences in food consumption and food/soda taxes based on obesity rates in the US.  Notice the dramatic differences in soft drink consumption among populations with different obesity rates.  At first glance, it appears that cutting back on sodas is our best bet for reducing […]

How to Avoid Misleading Conclusions: Explore Your Data

Often we have to work with data without knowing all the details of how it was collected and processed.  In those situations we first need to determine what information the data contains and what it can and cannot tell us.   We need to ask questions of the data and determine whether it makes sense, […]