Thank goodness we’re starting to see consumer-facing healthcare analytics. Daily Strength’s user-generated treatment efficacy rankings and Vimo’s procedure comparison shopping tool offer excellent examples of recent entrants’ efforts.
A week ago, I ran across Who is Sick, a company tackling what I’d call communicable disease geotargeting. With trivial pursuit-esque pies dotting a city map, the company visually represents the harboring of illness. Fascinating. Consider the following current map of Louisville:
They’ve certainly not hit a statistically significant reporting threshold but the concept clearly has merit and I bet version 2 takes it further. I’m imagining the more serious - cancer clusters around who knows what - and less - chicken pox pies in circles around schools. Let’s hope medical advances (e.g. ability to easily differentiate symptomology of contagious vs. non-contagious illness) and data distillation (e.g. color-coded zones in the vein of traffic sites) better inform the picture.
Who is Sick reminds me of a case study in Edward Tufte’s venerable Visual Explanations. He highlights the work of John Snow, who solved the mystery of an 1854 cholera epidemic in London by mapping deaths from the outbreak against a city layout and thereby targeted the source - a water pump. The bars in the image below represent deaths:
It would seem this business is less about “who” and more about “where.” After all, disease is a product not only of human-borne contagion but often geo-specific root cause. I’d love to see environmental allergy symptoms, for instance, mapped against city centers as a proxy for air quality.
Incidentally, wouldn’t it be great to see good health mapped? Of course, one might infer health in the absence of disease but there’s a continuum there and I’d like to see areas of exceptionally strong health. Ponce de Leon would surely have taken to such a tool in his quest for the Fountain of Youth!
For a visual person like myself, this is great way to get my hands around illness. Although I’m fearful it’s another way for insurance companies to discriminate against customers and potential customers.