Cielo Ramirez

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  • in reply to: Discussion 4 (DTDW21) #8267
    Cielo Ramirez
    Participant

    I have seen both box-and-whisker plots and frequency histograms used for reporting clinical and academic research data. Depending on the shape of the data, researchers I’ve known often prefer box-and-whisker plots for visualizing and comparing different sets of data. Though, these can be a headache for people to create and edit for their presentations. An alternate way to show a very small distribution is a stemplot, although I’ve never actually seen these used.

    in reply to: Discussion 3 (DTDW21) #8263
    Cielo Ramirez
    Participant

    Ranking is best represented by a bar graph, either in descending order to highlight high values or ascending to highlight low values.
    The highest-ranking service category for both Northern and Eastern zones is Curative Care Visit (1110 and 589, respectively).
    The lowest ranking service category for the Northern zone is Speech Therapy (1); For the Eastern zone, it is tied between Inpatient Medical and Inpatient Obstetrics (2).

    in reply to: Discussion 2 (DTDW21) #8259
    Cielo Ramirez
    Participant

    A line graph would be best for emphasizing the overall pattern of membership trends over the course of the year. A line graph also allows for easy comparison of Eastern and Northern categories.

    The best graph for comparing total membership to categorical subdivisions depends on the type of quantitative relationship that you want to highlight. A stacked bar graph could emphasize the part-to-whole relationships, but it becomes too cluttered with four subcategories and 12 time points for each. Reducing this to 4 time values, as others have suggested is a good solution.

    If the time series relationships are most important for interpretation, a line graph could be used to emphasize the overall pattern for each subcategory. With this dataset, a clear pattern emerges that also allows for ranking.

    in reply to: Discussion 1 (DTDW21) #8229
    Cielo Ramirez
    Participant

    This dashboard does fulfill Few’s one-sentence definition of a dashboard, but there is certainly room for improvement. It displays information needed to improve patient outcomes by indicating harmful trends. These can be addressed with further investigation and solutions can be implemented. All of the data for key indicators is consolidated on a single screen. While it reads like a report, stop-light color-coding does lead the reader to a conclusion about which indicators are problematic and require further attention.

    As Few notes in his “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe” article, color is not an effective means for visually encoding quantitative values. Splitting the time scale into months is a meaningful improvement from quarters, but it is difficult to interpret much regarding trends over time. This dashboard does not readily show the degree of deviation from acceptable bounds. It fails to readily show how individual data points are related to one another, unless a threshold is crossed. It does not facilitate comparison between different indicators. Importantly, all dashboard functionality collapses when this is printed out on the available black and white printers for stakeholders to reference.

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