Blood Work Visualization
Wired magazine wrote an article this month about making the results of the blood tests from our doctors less cryptic, by add visualization charts, graphics, and color coding.
Only one question remains after reading this article: why on earth did it take so long for someone to do this?
The last time I got my blood results, the doctor had scrawled some notes next to the results. A check mark for each item that was normal, and a quick note next to blood sugar: "A little high."
What, exactly, does "a little high" mean? After reading it, I had to go online and do some digging. How high is too high when we're talking about blood sugar? What am I at risk for? How at risk am I? And so on.
Eventually, after enough Googling, I figured out where I stood in the blood sugar spectrum. I did it by parsing information from a number of publicly available sources, but it was nothing that couldn't have been presented to me in the form of a simple bar chart with a green section ("safe"), yellow section ("warning"), or red section ("problem!").
I think that whenever we (as patients) are given data that's meant to be taken seriously, experienced doctors in high positions resist any innovation that makes analyzing the data more accessible. They resist changing the text-heavy data format to the colorful chart format. This resistance is based on fear, and it's the fear that the more presentable data is to people, the less apt they are to take it seriously.
It's the teacher who won't let students laugh in her classroom, because if they're laughing, they're not focused and learning the material.
I might be wrong about this, but it's not a stretch to imagine a doctor not wanting his patient's blood work to look like something colorful from a Dr. Seuss book, for fear that the patient might miss the gravity of the results. If a patient has to Google to figure things out, at least they're engaged in the diagnosis a little bit, and maybe that leads to increased compliance.
Or it might just be that to your average doctor, blood results don't appear to be broken, and so they don't seem to need any fixing.
I don't really think they're broken, but that's not to say they couldn't benefit from a designer's touch. Good design engages. It draws the eye in, and makes the viewer want to keep looking at the content. The more important the information, the more critical the design process should be in planning the delivery of the information.
My guess: the Wired article will result in some debate among doctors and medical practitioners, which will lead to a study testing the effects of delivering visualized results versus standard ones. The results of this comparison study will be inconclusive or "statistically insignificant" or some such nonsense, and with no apparent benefit to doctors or patients, the results will stay the way they are.
Let's hope I'm wrong. In the meantime, it can never hurt to figure out how to start creating visualizations where you work. A picture of a thousand data points is worth more than the data it represents...so long as it's easy on the eyes.
Only one question remains after reading this article: why on earth did it take so long for someone to do this?
The last time I got my blood results, the doctor had scrawled some notes next to the results. A check mark for each item that was normal, and a quick note next to blood sugar: "A little high."
What, exactly, does "a little high" mean? After reading it, I had to go online and do some digging. How high is too high when we're talking about blood sugar? What am I at risk for? How at risk am I? And so on.
Eventually, after enough Googling, I figured out where I stood in the blood sugar spectrum. I did it by parsing information from a number of publicly available sources, but it was nothing that couldn't have been presented to me in the form of a simple bar chart with a green section ("safe"), yellow section ("warning"), or red section ("problem!").
I think that whenever we (as patients) are given data that's meant to be taken seriously, experienced doctors in high positions resist any innovation that makes analyzing the data more accessible. They resist changing the text-heavy data format to the colorful chart format. This resistance is based on fear, and it's the fear that the more presentable data is to people, the less apt they are to take it seriously.
It's the teacher who won't let students laugh in her classroom, because if they're laughing, they're not focused and learning the material.
I might be wrong about this, but it's not a stretch to imagine a doctor not wanting his patient's blood work to look like something colorful from a Dr. Seuss book, for fear that the patient might miss the gravity of the results. If a patient has to Google to figure things out, at least they're engaged in the diagnosis a little bit, and maybe that leads to increased compliance.
Or it might just be that to your average doctor, blood results don't appear to be broken, and so they don't seem to need any fixing.
I don't really think they're broken, but that's not to say they couldn't benefit from a designer's touch. Good design engages. It draws the eye in, and makes the viewer want to keep looking at the content. The more important the information, the more critical the design process should be in planning the delivery of the information.
My guess: the Wired article will result in some debate among doctors and medical practitioners, which will lead to a study testing the effects of delivering visualized results versus standard ones. The results of this comparison study will be inconclusive or "statistically insignificant" or some such nonsense, and with no apparent benefit to doctors or patients, the results will stay the way they are.
Let's hope I'm wrong. In the meantime, it can never hurt to figure out how to start creating visualizations where you work. A picture of a thousand data points is worth more than the data it represents...so long as it's easy on the eyes.