Inpatient EHR Vendor Selections - Pick Your Favorite Visualization

[joe_warbington]

In an article entitled Which Vendors Lead the Healthcare Big Data Analytics Market? author Jennifer Bresnick on November 19, 2015 details some of the fragmentation in the market for not only electronic health record systems but also healthcare analytics.

I usually cringe at colorful pie charts, and I'm hoping Jennifer will allow me to help her out next round with Qlik Sense. The pie charts in her article are sorted incorrectly and colored all willy-nilly.

So, I quickly scraped the data and built the charts in Qlik Cloud in a matter of a few minutes, leading to your choice of three visualizations that I believe better convey the market share leaders in inpatient EHRs.

First up, the pie chart:
https://charts.qlikcloud.com/56535eebbf2c5de70234c9be/chart.html

Secondly, a personal favorite, the tree map:
https://charts.qlikcloud.com/56535e34bf2c5de70234c9b8/chart.html

Finally and perhaps most easily consumable, the ever capable bar chart:
https://charts.qlikcloud.com/56535e50bf2c5de70234c9ba/chart.html

Which one is your favorite? Leave a note in the comments.

Always willing to help out Jennifer and HealthcareIT Analytics team! It's only a few minutes to get beautiful, interactive, and easy to consume visualizations. Feel free to embed those in your site!

Everything is powered by Qlik Sense. Try it here free, for Mac, PC, Linux, iPad, Android, Kindle, Microsoft Surface, Palm Pilot, Commodore 64, etc. (Note: I haven't personally tested most of these systems.)

Originally posted on LinkedIn: Inpatient EHR Vendor Selection - Pick Your Favorite Visualization

[rwunderlich]

What's the  meaning of the three different hues -- Red Orange & Blue?

[Or]

Seems he used a color scale - red to dark blue - to encode the same "market percent" value that's already being displayed by the size of the chunk (or length of the bar). Thoroughly unnecessary to the point of distraction, but makes the chart more eye-candy-ish, I guess.

[Or]

Obviously, the bar chart does the best job here if you're trying to actually compare EHRs. Over half the market is controlled by a total of three applications (as presented, this is easiest to see in the pie chart, but would be easier to see in a combined bar/line chart that includes a cumulative percentage as a line). Additionally, the use of color to encode the primary variable seems completely unnecessary and even distracting - it rarely pays to present the same variable, in the same chart, using two different methods of encoding.

The real question here is what story we are trying to tell. In this case, the EHR chart is intended to provide a frame of reference for a second chart showing a significantly-more-fragmented market for business intelligence market share. This means that we are looking for a chart that will show us, easily, the (relative) lack of fragmentation in this particular market - a bar chart, sorted by size (with "Others" placed at the bottom, if it exists), with an accumulation line and a reference line around 50%. When we present the other charts in the article in the same manner, it will be easy to see that more vendors are required to reach 50%, and additionally, that there is a large "Others" bar at the bottom for some charts but none for this one.

Bar charts are usually a better option than pie or area charts, and this doesn't seem to be an exception.

[ThornOfCrowns]

For me, the Tree Map is just a square Pie Chart, just as difficult to read and compare. Try remaking this without the percentages displayed and then try to guess the difference CPSI / McKesson / Other.

The Bar chart is nearly always superior to the Pie and Tree, but for a dozen values it might just be better to show the numbers. I think most people can get that 22% is bigger than 17% etc., without any other colour coding or graphics.

[chriscammers]

I agree the Bar chart is superior but users love pie charts and will cling to them tenatiously.