How Data Visualization Transformed Healthcare Forever

Once upon a time...

Two contemporaries, one hailed as "the Father of Epidemiology" the other ostracized and rejected, they are Dr. John Snow and Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis respectively.

Both of them made significant scientific discoveries, however only one of them would see his work come to fruition in his lifetime.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis? (1818 - 1865)

Dr. Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor in 1846 was appointed to a role within a large maternity hospital in Vienna that had two clinics for training doctors & midwives. Healthy, expecting women would suddenly die shortly after giving birth from a mysterious illness called puerperal or childbed fever. Semmelweis was curious as to why the doctors’ clinic had an average mortality of 9.9% vs. the midwives’ clinic 3.9%.

After conducting his investigation Semmelweis found that the Doctors, unlike midwives, performed autopsies in the morning and the rest of their days treating patients. Semmelweis suspected that there was some sort of contaminant that was being transferred from the cadavers to the patients.

Semmelweis found that a chlorinated lime solution could remove the deadly contaminants from the doctors’ hands. He introduced a new handwashing policy for the doctors , and the mortality rate in the doctors’ maternity clinic fell by 82%. Though he still observed students who were negligent, when he instituted stricter policies the mortality rate fell to 0.

Semmelweis? had collected 18 months of statistical data showing his hand washing approach worked and that it could save thousands of lives. But in 1849, Semmelweis was terminated and blocked from attaining similar positions in Vienna.

He returned to his home in Budapest and after 10 years published his life’s work The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever – a 500-page book devoted to his research.

?Semmelweis was ridiculed and his research was rejected, eventually he had some kind of mental breakdown and was committed to a mental institution in 1865. Two weeks later he passed away at the age of 47 succumbing to an infected wound inflicted by the asylum’s guards.?

Why did Semmelweis fail?

?From a visual perspective, when Semmelweis published his book, it included 60 data tables without a single data chart

Even though the data table contained the relevant data points without the aid of a time-series chart the star differences were not clear.

If Semmelweis had only visualized his data, it would have been so obvious.

Dr. John Snow (1813 - 1858)? - the father of Epidemiology.

This is how his map of the Cholera outbreak helped convince skeptical politicians to remove the handle on the Broad Street pump and save countless lives.?

Between 1848 and 1854, a series of cholera outbreaks occurred in London with large-scale loss of life. One epidemic of cholera occurred in the area of Broad Street.? In 1854, a cholera epidemic broke out, affecting resident families of tailors and clerks from the shops of nearby Regent Street. The epidemic caused violent diarrhea and very high mortality, with some 600 deaths in one week during September 1854.

The prevailing Miasma Theory was that cholera was caused by airborne transmission of poisonous vapors from foul smells due to poor sanitation. At the same time, the competing Germ Theory that inspired Snow was still an unproven minority opinion in medical circles.?

For Snow, his work “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera” of mapping the addresses of London residents who had fallen ill of Cholera and their proximity to the Broad Street pump revealed quite effectively that there was a clear relationship between a specific water source and those who contracted the disease. As a result of Snow’s work, the town council removed the pump’s handle and the outbreak was contained.

Had Snow not used his data visualization, who knows if he would have been able to convince the local government to remove the pump’s handle.

What Snow got right was that he understood the value of communicating complex data in a visually persuasive way.

When Cholera struck again in 1866 , health officials issued the first known boil water advisory.

The Moral of the Story

Data visualization matters, it is a necessary aid to pass the chasm that often arrives when communicating technical information to non-technical end users - albeit very influential audiences.

Unfortunately many healthcare organizations' data strategies only go as far as enabling analytics teams with the right tools yet missing the mark on enabling these analysts with the necessary skills to turn their raw data into actionable insights.

In a recent "Thinking with Google" article they propose a 10/90 rule for analytics' teams success. "Invest 10% of the analytics budget in tools and the remaining 90% in people."

Training your team to be more efficient data communicators is a must in today's attention deprived world. We've lead many data visualization workshops for our clients and we always love to hear how their executives are so much more engaged after they've put our training to work.

Need help upskilling your analytics team?

If you lead a team of data professionals and would like to have our team lead an on-site or remote workshop, we would love to hear from you!

Stay tuned for next week's edition of Health Data Analyzed for more useful tips on data visualization