Reflection on making the How busy is your hospital? dashboard

If you click here, you will see that we have created a way of visualising the pressure in hospitals.

I thought I would share the process we have been through to create this visualisation in the hope that other people may improve the process or find something useful from our learning.

The data arrives twice daily as an image taken from the screen of the main monitoring station of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority. Having an image taken from the computer screen is not ideal, but this was the most efficient way we could obtain the information. 

Once we got hold of the first lot of data we decided to develop a way to show this information so people could understand it at a glance.

It was also important to make the process of updating the information as simple as possible.

Initially we attempted creating a map with intensity levels showing in various colours, however the quality of the visualisation made it difficult to see separate the clusters of acute hospitals in the Birmingham area.

Eventually I decided the best way was to use pressure gauges and Google spreadsheets.

I did this because:

• It allows collaboration between team members
• The data set can be made viewable to the public 
• The gauges gadget was ideal for displaying pressure levels.

Another bonus is the Google docs is a free application.

The gauges can be adjusted by altering the data inside the Google spreadsheet that 'powers' the dashboard you see on the website; this whole process takes around 20 minutes.

We are also archiving the twice daily reports which will develop into a useful reflective dataset. You can view the main dataset here, each report is timestamped on the left and the pressure levels are indicated by the four colours, green = 1, yellow = 2, orange = 3, red = 4.

I'm interested in other people's ideas around visualising NHS data such as this.

What data would you like to see displayed on dashboards as well as available in raw format for others to use?