DataGeek III: Healthcare Finances and Volumes

[Former Member]

There are only two things in this world that I'll do anything for - a good story, and a free t-shirt. As such, I'm not new to the Data Geek Challenge Home (first I took on the NBA, then I dug into the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference agenda). Here I am for Round 3, and not only did I bring some Healthcare Data, but I spared you all from NSFW images of Game of Thrones characters with bubble charts tastefully photoshopped on top.

For the data set, I pulled in data from the health section of data.gov. I specifically looked for Medicare charge and payment info since they are by far the largest medical payer in the country. Once I had it, I pulled in the data and did a very little cleaning (mostly changed some assumed sums to averages, and cteated a geographic hierarchy (I'll leave the "how" to the very good official tutorials). Then I tossed together some charts. It didn't take me very long to notice that I wasn't finding a whole lot interesting. That's when I went looking for the lightbulb. You see, in recent versions of Lumira, a "Related Visualizations" button which you can click on, then pick a measure, and it will then tell you what dimensions of your data most influence that measure. It's a great starting point.

Once I did that, I flipped through the influencers to create some visualizations based on my favorites. I then flipped over to compose to create an infographic on the most interesting things I discovered. A little color never hurt anyone.

You can check out my infographic (I shared it on Lumira Cloud) or check out my .lums file (available briefly)at any of the links below to dig in further.

It's not exactly polished, but I was able to put it together very quickly, and if I had any idea what I was talking about I'm sure I could have put even more lipstick on that pig.