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 […]

Fiscal Period Calculations in Tableau

For the most part it’s fairly easy to calculate fiscal periods in Tableau. Here is one approach that requires two parameters and two date functions. This approach allows us to create custom Fiscal Periods on the fly – which can be useful for building what-if scenarios or for working with data that trickles in over […]

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:

Dashboards vs. Scorecards: Technical Hair Splitting?

Many people use the terms “dashboard” and “scorecard” interchangeably. This post explores one critical difference between the […]

The Power of In-House Analytics

A business associate recently forwarded a white paper by one of the global BI software companies with the comment “… it all sounds so simple, yet we both know the complexities are just under the table.”  Like all good marketing materials, this white paper talked about the current pain of the target audience and provided […]

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 […]

Decision Making During Turmoil: How Well Are We Prepared?

In order to make profitable decisions, we need good information.  Whether we base our decisions on sales, customer perceptions or the number of widgets we shipped last month, our information comes from some system that collects and measures relevant data for us.

In my Six Sigma Black Belt class we recently discussed the challenges of developing […]