“A picture is worth a million rows.”
Estimated reading time: 4 mins
In our last post, we saw 6 exceptional examples of data visualization. For businesses that work with pharmaceutical companies specifically, data visualization is often lacking or not utilized at all. Yet, as we have seen, visuals can be critical for both making sense of the sheer volume of data available and enabling your audience to access data.
The pharmaceutical world has its own set of data challenges. For one, the types of data involved vary. Whether dealing with highly technical drug research or prescribing trends among millions of HCPs or the impact of changing legislation on access to prescriptions, pharmaceutical data is vast and complex. Without a strategy for translating data into usable material, important information could remain obscured. As Michael Price notes, pharma companies are tasked with bringing “to life the data behind our brands. Better put, we are asked to communicate complex stories in a way that is facile and succinct.”
Here are four ways to put data visualization to use for your company.
1. To Understand the Marketplace
Before you begin shaping data for customer use, it’s important to understand your place in the market. Your own internal data visualization can help you evaluate the market your business serves. Whether it’s determining the right time to develop a new product or detecting emerging trends, data visualization, if done well, can help you generate insights critical to your company’s success.
Here’s an example of raw data versus visualized data. The table below contains figures on research spending by top pharmaceutical companies. Though simple and containing relatively little data, this table makes it difficult to quickly determine the extent to which drug spending differs from company to company.
Source: Forbes
However, when this information is represented graphically, it becomes obvious which drug company spends the most on R&D overall. Viewers can also navigate between two other visualizations to learn how much companies spend on average per drug and how many drugs each company has developed.
Source: http://infogr.am/Total-Pharmaceutical-R
This information is much more powerful when visualized because the numbers become tangible. It’s easy to get the big picture without wading through dozens of mind-numbing figures.
2. To Ask the Right Questions
In order to understand data, it’s important to ask the right questions of it. This can get tricky, though, when you’re not quite sure what those questions should be. Data visualization can help you hone in on the right questions by displaying the results of the questions you asked and inviting evaluation of how information is represented visually.
For example, let’s say a client asked us to improve upon this graphic:
While the chart is simple, it isn’t clear. What’s the point? Who is the intended audience? What insights are we supposed to glean from this information?
Re-visualizing the data helps answer some of the questions raised by the first graphic. Displaying the same information in a different format, adding color coding, and summarizing the main point upfront all help to clarify the message of this chart. However, while better than the first, this graphic doesn’t quite capture what the client is trying to communicate or fully answer the questions raised.
The last graphic effectively pinpoints what the client is trying to communicate without complicating interpretation with irrelevant information. After some trial and error, the client realized that the main point of the graphic was to demonstrate the percentage of patients who take their medications as prescribed. By visualizing the data provided, we figured out which questions needed to be asked of the data so that we could communicate the client’s message simply and powerfully.
Example and data are fictional; graphics adapted from Evergreen Data
3. To Make Information Accessible to a Broader Audience
The ability to make vast amounts of data understandable to a wide audience is one key benefit of data visualization. This is especially true in the pharmaceutical world where complex data drives costly decision making. Good data visualization can bridge the gap between the highly-specialized information coming from labs and the boardroom executives who must interpret those results and decide how to proceed. Michael Spitz helpfully points out that, “At their heart, effective visualizations simply and immediately convey a dramatic story or make a convincing point.”
Take for instance the following table on prescription drug spending in 1960 and 2014.
The information is fairly straightforward. But, when visualized, it becomes more clear what percentage of total spending each payer was responsible for and the vast difference between 2014 and 1960 in terms of responsible payers.
This graphic demonstrates the difference between 1960 and 2014 in terms of the prescription drug market size. While it’s easy to note that the prescription market of 1960 is about 1% of the size of 2014’s market, the impact increases when this information is portrayed graphically.
Adapted from data and visualization at CHCF
4. To Enable People to Interact with your Data
One of the more recent benefits of data visualization is that data can come alive in ways that were previously impossible. Newer data visualizations are interactive, allowing users to change factors that impact the data displayed and the expected outcomes of certain decisions. This is especially useful in an era where the amount of data available is astronomical, and growing. A well-made data visualization can distill massive amounts of data into one key insight.
A good example of pharma-specific data visualization comes from PricewaterhouseCoopers and their Pharma2020 data analysis. The original information in their report is comprised of nearly 1,000 pieces of raw data and looks like this:
To enable users to better understand and interact with their data, PwC created an interactive map that offers comparisons between dozens of countries across different factors such as projected population, economic indicators, and personal affluence. The ability to evaluate several counties side-by-side allows users to quickly identify differences and commonalities. This makes it easier to get the big picture, draw insights and make informed decisions.
Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers
How do you stack up?
Is your own own data visualization persuasive and compelling? How well does it communicate your message? Are you maximizing the value of your data-driven products?
We have helped clients successfully leverage the power of data visualization for their pharmaceutical businesses. Whether you need to improve upon existing graphics or develop visualizations from scratch, we have the tools in place to create compelling data visualizations that get results. Contact Brian to learn more about how our data visualization services can take your data to the next level.
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