To help make sense of the mountains of healthcare information piling up every day, GE has been looking for ways to visualize the data so that more people can use it. In the sixth in our data visualization series, we again partnered with our friends at GOOD — which is the magazine and website for people who want “to do good” — to look at some alarming projections. As the team points out, chronic diseases cost us billions of dollars every year in the U.S, and the costs are only expected to rise. The map below, which expands when clicked, shows the cost of treating cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions in 2003 — which is the last year this data was available — and projections for 2023. As you can see, it makes a good case for the need to lower healthcare costs.To help make sense of the mountains of healthcare information piling up every day, GE has been looking for ways to visualize the data so that more people can use it. In the sixth in our data visualization series, we again partnered with our friends at GOOD — which is the magazine and website for people who want “to do good” — to look at some alarming projections. As the team points out, chronic diseases cost us billions of dollars every year in the U.S, and the costs are only expected to rise. The map below, which expands when clicked, shows the cost of treating cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions in 2003 — which is the last year this data was available — and projections for 2023. As you can see, it makes a good case for the need to lower healthcare costs.
As the data visualization team observed, “Our current system often simply pays to treat chronic diseases over the long term. Instead, we could save money by encouraging behavior that would stop these diseases before they start, or by attacking them quickly after the discovery of early warning signs.”
Today’s ‘Chronic Diseases” map is the third one developed by the team from GOOD, and joins three others created by Seed Visualization. The information fueling today’s map comes from a groundbreaking study, “An Unhealthy America: The Economic Impact of Chronic Disease,” developed by the Milken Institute. It details the enormous financial impact of chronic disease on the U.S. economy — not only in treatment costs, but lost worker productivity — today and in the decades ahead. The full study, which is available at http://www.chronicdiseaseimpact.com/, also describes the huge savings if a serious effort were made to improve Americans’ health.
The goal of GE’s data visualization project is to find new ways to synthesize, simplify and communicate healthcare information — some of which draws on the six million patient records in GE’s proprietary electronic medical records — and use it to increase awareness about important health trends. GE hopes that awareness can help increase access to care — which is one of the drivers of GE’s healthymagination strategy.
Try out our other visualization tools:
* GOOD’s Causes of Death info-graphic shows the leading causes by age
* GOOD’s World Health info-graphic shows the money 12 countries spend on healthcare
* Seed’s The Cost of Getting Sick tool shows the cost of chronic conditions
* Seed’s Health Issues tool shows how some conditions are related to one another
* Seed’s How’s Your Health Profile? tool lets you see conditions common to your profile
* See a video in “Ben Fry & Seed labs visualize The Cost of Getting Sick”
* Read “Visualizing world health with the data artists at GOOD” on GE Reports
* Learn more about our healthymagination business strategy
