Healthcare facilities are among the sectors that produce incredibly immense data. This data is valuable only if it’s leveraged to the fullest.
For instance, it could provide insights that help cut costs and improve service delivery.
You need tested and proven charts to extract actionable insights into healthcare data.
The tested and proven chart we recommend is a Pareto Chart.
The chart empowers you to categorize occurrences based on their impact on a common strategic goal or objective. This visualization design aims to categorize key variables in your data based on their frequency of occurrence.
Pareto Chart is based on the classic 80/20 rule. The rule says that 20% of the causal factors result in 80% of the overall outcomes. For instance, 80% of the world’s total wealth is held by 20% of the population.
This easy-to-read chart prevents you from attacking the causes randomly by uncovering the top 20% of the problems, negatively affecting 80% of your overall performance.
Google Sheets lacks Pareto Charts.
You can download and install a specific add-on in Google Sheets to access the ready-to-use Pareto Chart.
Before diving into the blog’s core, we’ll address the following question: what is a healthcare graph?
Healthcare charts provide healthcare providers with in-depth insights into patients’ medical history for holistic and personalized care.
You can leverage this visualization design to display actionable insights into patient’s conditions with a view to improving:
In the coming section, we’ll address the Pareto Analysis in healthcare.
You don’t want to miss it.
The healthcare sector can use Pareto to uncover the 20% factors causing 80% of problems and inefficiencies, such as promoting prevention care.
In terms of healthcare quality, a greater percentage of problems come from a smaller percentage of factors.
Let’s look at more applications of the Pareto Chart in healthcare.
Its simplicity makes the chart applicable to a wide range of situations, both within and beyond quality improvement.
At the healthcare leadership or management level, Pareto chart in quality control of the healthcare sector can be used at the start of a new round of quality improvement
Yes, you can use the chart to map out the problems that are responsible for the most complaints or losses and dedicate improvement resources.
For example, the leadership at an unnamed healthcare facility believed that the majority of patients’ complaints were due to poor customer service. But insights from a Pareto Chart in healthcare showed that most patients complained about food and sanitation.
Once a problem has been identified and a team assembled, use a Pareto Chart in healthcare to select critical areas that need urgent help.
The healthcare sector’s problems are big and multifaceted.
For instance, a shortage of a particular drug may occur due to a wide variety of reasons, such as a breakdown in supply chains due to wars or pandemics.
If there are multiple problematic areas, it’s time-saving to focus on significant segments first.
Use Pareto Chart in healthcare to solve conflicts, particularly in healthcare projects with multiple moving parts or work functions.
Team members may have sharp disagreements about how to proceed, either because they wish to defend their departments or know the problem.
For example, a hospital project improvement team was prevented from reducing operating room delays because the anesthesiologists blamed the surgeons and vice versa. However, insights from a Pareto Chart in healthcare showed neither of the team caused the problem.
In the ensuing section, we’ll cover the benefits of the Pareto Chart in healthcare.
Pareto Chart in healthcare makes it amazingly easy to extract answers from your data to create compelling stories.
Imagine using the tables and spreadsheets to explain emerging patterns and other significant insights about a hospital to your audience.
Bulky data provides unlimited opportunities for the healthcare sector to extract actionable insights. Yes, insights that could spell the difference between your brand and competition.
Visualizing using Pareto Chart in healthcare data helps pinpoint relationships and patterns between metrics. Exploring these patterns enables you to save immense resources, such as time, by focusing only on areas that need urgent action.
Pareto Charts can help you easily spot errors in the data. Working with error-free data validates the accuracy of the insights extracted.
In the coming section, we’ll take you through examples of how to read Pareto chart.
You don’t want to miss this.
The chart above is visualizing insights into the most reported medication errors in an unnamed healthcare facility.
Missed doses, wrong timing, wrong drug, and overdose form the 80% of the errors reported.
A proactive healthcare crisis management team should focus on 80% of issues forming the bulk of the problems reported.
In this Pareto chart example, 8 different surgical errors are being compared by the number of occurrences. From this visual representation of the data, you can quickly see wrong supplier, excess count, too few counts & wrong size are causing 80% of errors.
In the coming section, we’ll address how to create a Pareto Chart in healthcare.
Google Sheets is a trusted data visualization tool because it’s familiar and has been there for years.
But the spreadsheet application lacks a ready-made Pareto Chart in healthcare.
We understand switching tools is not an easy task.
Therefore, we’re not advocating you ditch Google Sheets in favor of other expensive data visualization tools.
There’s an easy-to-use and amazingly affordable visualization tool that comes as an add-in you can easily install in your Google Sheets ready-made Pareto Chart in healthcare.
The tool is called ChartExpo.
So, what is ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is an incredibly intuitive add-on you can easily install in your Google Sheets without watching hours of YouTube tutorials.
In the coming section, we’ll take you through how to install ChartExpo into your Google Sheets.
You don’t want to miss this!
This section will use a Pareto Chart in healthcare to visualize the tabular data below.
| Medication Errors | Frequency |
| Dose missed | 92 |
| Wrong time | 83 |
| Wrong drug | 76 |
| Overdose | 59 |
| Wrong patient | 53 |
| Wrong route | 27 |
| Wrong calculation | 16 |
| Duplicated drugs | 9 |
| Under dose | 7 |
| Wrong IV rate | 4 |
| Technique error | 3 |
| Unauthorized drug | 1 |
To install the ChartExpo, add-on for Google Sheets, click this link.
The Pareto Chart is a mix of a bar graph and a line chart. It’s used for demonstrating the 80-20 principle. Individual problems (or data points) are represented using bars, and these bars are arranged in descending order — from the largest to the smallest. A curved line is used to represent the cumulative total of the data set.
With the Pareto chart, you can highlight critical elements of a (typically large) set of factors.
For instance, in the healthcare sector, a Pareto Chart can display the source of the most medical errors, the most frequently occurring error type, or the most frequent basis for patients’ complaints, among others.
Healthcare facilities are among the sectors that produce immense data. This data is valuable only if it’s leveraged to the fullest.
You need tested and proven charts to extract actionable insights from healthcare data. The tested and proven chart we recommend is a Pareto Chart.
The chart empowers you to categorize occurrences based on their impact on a common strategic goal or objective. This visualization design aims to categorize key variables in your data based on their frequency of occurrence.
Pareto Chart is based on the classic 80/20 rule. The rule says that 20% of the causal factors result in 80% of the overall outcomes.
And it prevents you from attacking the causes randomly by uncovering the top 20% of the problems, negatively affecting 80% of your overall performance.
Google Sheets lacks Pareto Charts.
So, what’s the solution?
We recommend you install third-party apps, such as ChartExpo, to access ready-to-use Pareto Chart in healthcare.
ChartExpo is an add-on for Google Sheets loaded with insightful and ready-to-go Pareto Chart. You don’t need programming or coding skills to use ChartExpo.
Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made Pareto Charts that are easy to interpret and visually appealing to your target audience.
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