Visualizing Health and Healthcare Data

Creating Clear and Compelling Visualizations to "See How You're Doing"

Katherine Rowell, Lindsay Betzendahl, Cambria Brown

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119680864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Processing
• Index: Computer Science

The only data visualization book written by and for health and healthcare professionals.

In health and healthcare, data and information are coming at organizations faster than they can consume and interpret it. Health providers, payers, public health departments, researchers, and health information technology groups know the ability to analyze and communicate this vast array of data in a clear and compelling manner is paramount to success. However, they simply cannot find experienced people with the necessary qualifications. The quickest (and often the only) route to meeting this challenge is to hire smart people and train them.

Visualizing Health and Healthcare Data: Creating Clear and Compelling Visualizations to "See how You're Doing" is a one-of-a-kind book for health and healthcare professionals to learn the best practices of data visualization specific to their field. It provides a high-level summary of health and healthcare data, an overview of relevant visual intelligence research, strategies and techniques to gather requirements, and how to build strong teams with the expertise required to create dashboards and reports that people love to use. Clear and detailed explanations of data visualization best practices will help you understand the how and the why.

• Learn how to build beautiful and useful data products that deliver powerful insights for the end user
• Follow along with examples of data visualization best practices, including table and graph design for health and healthcare data
• Learn the difference between dashboards, reports, multidimensional exploratory displays and infographics (and why it matters)
• Avoid common mistakes in data visualization by learning why they do not work and better ways to display the data

Written by a top leader in the field of health and healthcare data visualization, this book is an excellent resource for top management in healthcare, as well as entry-level to experienced data analysts in any health-related organization.

SECTION TWO
Perceiving the Best Practices of Data Visualization

“No matter how clever the choice of information, and no matter how technologically impressive the encoding, a visualization fails if the decoding fails. Some display methods lead to efficient, accurate decoding, and others lead to inefficient, inaccurate decoding. It is only through scientific study of visual perception that informed judgements can be made about display methods.”

—William S. Cleveland,
The Elements of Graphing

Chapter Four
The Research

Research Informs Data Visualization Best Practices

Data visualization relies on visual perception and interpretation, so understanding how and why humans see and perceive what they do is crucial to creating engaging, accurate, and meaningful data displays.

As Colin Ware, author of Information Visualization: Perception for Design, writes:

The human visual system is a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety … [that] has its own rules. We can easily see patterns presented in certain ways, but if they are presented in other ways, they become invisible. … Following perception-based rules, we can present our data in such a way that the important and informative patterns stand out. If we disobey the rules, our data will be incomprehensible or misleading. (Ware, 2020, xiv)

It, therefore, follows that learning visualization techniques grounded in research on human cognition and vision are essential to ensuring that the most important patterns, trends, and variances—the vital message and stories in health and healthcare data—are easy to perceive and understand.

Additionally, the abundance of stimuli continually bombarding us means that now, more than ever, data visualizers must study and understand the existing and emerging research about how the human brain processes visual information, and how the results of this research inform the best practices of data visualization. The window to get and retain attention for the important stories, and opportunities to learn and improve health and healthcare systems, is narrow and the competition for attention stiff.

How stiff? Research has found that thanks to the growing presence of digital media in our lives, our attention span has declined from 12 seconds (in 2000) to about 8 seconds (2013). Sadly, at 9 seconds, the attention span of a goldfish is now longer than ours. (See Figure 4.1.)

FIGURE 4.1 A drop in human attention span makes it imperative that data visualizers understand how research informs the best practices of data visualization.

Vision is the strongest of the five senses, accounting for 70% of how information is taken in and made sense of. However, the human brain is highly selective, processing only about 5% of what is transmitted to it through vision. These limits serve to help humans focus on critical tasks, whether instinctual or honed through training and experience and stored in memory. Seeing and knowing to pick the one ripe red apple on a tree of mostly unripened green ones, responding with caution to a dark shape moving on the periphery, or generating a fight-or-flight response to a deadly predator are all examples of how our vision and brain communicate and help us to navigate (and survive in) the world.

A less instinctual task—one that depends on previous training and experience stored in memory to make sense—is reading text. As you read this book, your eyes focus on groups of words, not individual letters. These words have been previously learned and stored in memory, thereby creating the mechanism for your brain to take a shortcut and transform them instantly into words you know and understand.

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In day-to-day interactions, many details (a room's wall color; the unique features of people passing by on the street) are not processed by the brain because they would overwhelm it. Processing everything that enters the line of vision makes it impossible to focus on any one thing (including the very important task of reading this book!).

Wired to select the most critical information, the human brain, through vision, pays attention to things that stand out or are different from their surroundings. It seeks patterns and variations, then stores them for use in identifying the same or similar information when it is reencountered.

Preattentive Attributes

Preattentive processing takes place at humans' lowest visual acuity, occurring in milliseconds and registering select signals before the conscious mind is fully aware of what is happening. During these milliseconds, the brain seeks out and pays attention to specific properties and patterns it registers as being different or critical.

In data visualization, this means viewers will instantaneously see specific visual cues designed to leverage attributes of preattentive processing. Adding these visual cues to data displays can be powerful tools for signaling “look here!” and, when used accurately, will result in immediate insight.

The three common preattentive attributes (Figure 4.2) in data visualization are:

• Color (hue,...