Visualizing European healthcare using Tableau

Introduction

Healthcare may differ substantially between European countries. Given the wealth of information available on the web, I was curious to investigate if there is a relation between healthcare expenditure in a country on the one hand, and the quality of healthcare on the other hand.

⊕In this context quality of healthcare is defined as consumer friendliness. Further details follow below.

Rather than presenting a solid statistical claim that there is a relationship or not, in the current blog I’d like to focus on data visualization, with the primary goal of gaining insight. Tableau seems a great tool for doing that.

Method

Visualization software

Tableau Public 10.2 was used. Tableau has a licensed and a public version. The public version is free but one can only save data on the public server. Tableau is Graphic User Interface (GUI). Amongst others, a very nice feature of Tableau is the possibility of creating dashboards, assembling different plots, graphics and visualizations in one figure.

Data sources

The data that I used for the present purpose:

⊕If for countries only data for one source were available, the data were left out.

• Score on healthcare quality¹
• Healthcare expenditure²
• European population³

⊕There was a mismatch between England and Scotland being used as indicator in one source and Great Britain in the other source. For these reasons, these countries were removed from the analyses.

Analyses

The main analyses concern the relation between expenditure and quality of healthcare.

Expenditure estimates the total budget in Euros that was spent per capita in each country.

Quality of healthcare is in this context a measure of consumer friendliness. It is a score that is based on (1) patient rights and information, (2) accessibility (waiting time for treatment), (3) outcomes, (4) range and reach of services, (5) prevention, and (6) pharmaceuticals.

Result

The Tableau dashboard shows the following key results:

⊕On a mobile device only the scatterplot is displayed for reasons of screen size.

• A geographic map and barplot show that there are considerable differences in the healthcare expenditures and healthcare quality between countries.
• The scatterplot displays a relation between expenditure and healthcare quality. This means that in countries where more money was spent for healthcare, the score on consumer friendliness was better (or inverse, if less was spent, friendliness was worse). The point sizes represent the population for each country. At first sight, population does not have a relation with healthcare expenditure per capita and/or healthcare quality.

Short description of Tableau GUI

Underneath follows a description of the steps to reproduce the visualizations. The data can be retrieved from the given references, and should contain a column for country, score, and expenditure.

Geographic mapping

• Bring “Longitude (generated)” under columns, and “Latitude (generated)” under rows. This produces a map of the world.
• If not already the default value, select under dimensions, country, geographic role, country/region.
• Drag the country dimension underneath the card “Marks”.
• Drag the score column to color mark.
• Select color, edit color and change the steps to for example 20.
• Using the card “Marks”, label, selecting “show mark labels”, the numeric values of the variable score can be put into the geographical map for each country. It also allows for modifying the font.

Horizontal barplot

• Put average expenditure under columns
• Put country under rows.
• Order the average expenditure, on top the largest values. Note that this and other things can be changed interactively by the user, which is an attractive feature of Tableau.
• Under the Marks card, select size to adjust the thickness of the bars.

Scatterplot

• Bring the variables score and expenditure in respectively rows and columns.
• Click on the variables and select “dimensions”.
• Colors, size and other properties can be easily altered.
• By moving another variable into the Marks card “Size”, an additional third dimension can be displayed in the scatterplot, such as the population of a country by differently sized dots.
• Drag the country dimension into the Label button, which will directly show the country label for each point in the scatterplot.

Dashboard

• Change the size of the dashboard as “Automatic” under the drop down menu “Range”. This can be selected in the left column.
• One can drag and drop sheets into the dashboard, from “Sheets” displayed in the left column. The individual sheets can then be configured with respect to sizing and spacing.
• Any changes to a worksheet (e.g., adjusting a legend) will automatically be transferred to your Dashboard (so you do not have to do it twice).
• Allow a selected item to be floating, so that it can easily be handled and moved. This can be selected in the left column, under “objects”.

Closing words

The relation between healthcare expenditure and quality (i.e., consumer friendliness) seems quite convincing. Tableau has a multitude of effective plots, graphs and other visualizations, that can be used to assemble a Dashboard. It can produce influential visualizations in a relatively short timespan.

References

1. Healthcare quality, consumer friendliness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_health_consumer_index
2. Healthcare expenditure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita
3. Population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe

Contact

Share your ideas:

Web: https://rrighart.github.io

Email: rrighart@googlemail.com