About the data: The NEISS is a database of emergency room visits that involve consumer products collected from 100 hospitals across the country. This is the latest dataset available and covers the entirety of 2008. There were about 370,000 visits in that time frame to these hospitals. As Tableau Public only allows 100,000 rows of data, I used a random function to reduce the dataset.
Using the Visualization: Shown are the 98,000 cases, plotted on the y-axis by age of the patient, and categorized by the type of injury. The lines are colored by body part affected. By default, every product involved is shown. Use the filter on the right to select just a few. For example, deselect "all", and use the magnifying glass to search for just chain saws, select that product, and allow the chart to update. If you mouse over an individual case, you can see the narrative entered by the hospital about the accident.
The chart provides some information about age spread, and the incidence of a particular type of injury, while still allowing you to look at individual cases. I intend to do a lot more with Tableau and this data set - stay tuned for some dashboards. Click the image to interact with the data.
I'm betting your company has data that you'd like to know more about. Data Driven Consulting specializes in collecting, cleaning, and presenting data just like the example above.
Some notes about the way the data shows - the data is banded because the age is provided as a whole year, except for younger than 2 years, hence the blocking at the bottom.
ReplyDeleteThis does mean that multiple cases of the same age and disorder will end up overlaid on top of each other. This isn't as much of an issue when subsets of the data are viewed.
I wanted to plot the individual visits this tie round because the narrative on each case is revealing and gives a real feeling for the dataset.
Several of the many data geeks here inside Tableau have been passing around insights they've found inside this viz. Good stuff!
ReplyDeleteJames, thank you for releasing this.
ReplyDeleteThe data is sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing, always interesting. You'll be glad to know the bulk of the work was getting the data usable, not the learning curve of Tableau.
A 23 year old strained his leg on a fire alarm. More people lacerated themselves on their toilets than I can count. You have opened a window into the american home!
ReplyDeleteThere are some strange things in there - a lot really don't reflect a failure in the product or method of using it, just general incompetence.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been nice to see a field expressing whether the injury was as a direct result of the product, but I suppose that would have been too subjective?
:-)
ReplyDeleteThere's some great stuff in there - amazing reasons for injuries.
Lovely viz, too.