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I do not use box-and-whisker plots in my current role and rarely use histograms. However, I am familiar with both box-and-whisker plots and histograms, and have had experience of creating and using them extensively in academic settings.
Bar graphs are the best graphs to show ranking because they show categorical subdivisions of a measure, ordered by size, which allows us to quickly compare values.
The service category with the most frequent claims is Curative Care Visits in both the Eastern and Northern Zones. The service categories with the least frequent claims are Inpatient Medical and Inpatient Obstetrics in the Eastern Zone and Speech Therapy in the Northern Zone.
I think a line graph would be best for showing Flores del Mundo’s membership trends over the course of the year, since line graphs effectively display changes over time. If I was graphing total membership versus employee/spouse/dependent, I would use a bar graph instead of a line graph, because this is a part-to-whole relationship, which measures individual categorical subdivisions as ratios to the whole. I would use a line graph to show Eastern and Northern membership trends over the course of a year on the same graph, because the same time series is being used, and I am specifically still interested in seeing the membership trend for each region and trends are most effectively displayed in line graphs.
Although the WHO local maternity dashboard at the Mpilo Central Hospital does meet some components of Stephen Few’s definition of a dashboard, it appears to be more closely aligned with the definition a report than a dashboard. The WHO “dashboard” does display important information, in the form of a high-level summary, on a single screen and uses a red–amber–green, traffic-light coding system to alert users to changes in the frequency of selected parameters. However, this information is not visually displayed so that the user can easily monitor these metrics at a glance, which Few notes as an essential component of a dashboard. Furthermore, this color-coding system is lost when printed, since the Mpilo Central Hospital has no color-printing, eliminating the feature of the “dashboard” that visually alerted the user to changes in key performance indicators. Overall, the use of a table to display numerous metrics makes this information difficult to review, process, and draw meaningful conclusions quickly. This tool could certainly be optimized by displaying this information graphically or with the use of metric boxes, for example.
