What’s in a Chart? – Fun Friday

I’ve heard people say “What’s the difference between stats and lies? Nothing!” While that’s a bit of an exaggeration, there is something to say about stats that don’t share the real story. A good person with the right data can tell whatever story they want to tell.

I guess this fact is why this cartoon resonated so much to me and many others who shared it on social media.

The tweet is said from a marketer’s standpoint, but the same is true in healthcare as well. A nurse or doctor looking at a dashboard might miss something if the dashboards aren’t measuring the right thing. The same is true for any healthcare leader that spends time looking at dashboards. Dashboards are great…if you’re measuring and presenting the right things.

Don’t be WOWed by the fancy charts and graphs until you understand what the data really means.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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