Ben Fry & Seed labs visualize The Cost of Getting Sick

Because healthcare is so incredibly complex, GE has been looking for visual ways to synthesize, simplify and communicate the immense quantities of information becoming available each day. In the fourth in our series of new visualization tools, we’ve again partnered with Ben Fry, Director of Seed Visualization, to slice and dice some of the six million patient records in GE’s proprietary electronic medical records database. Clicking on The Cost of Getting Sick graphic below takes you to our interactive tool in which you can slide a bar to select your age and then click on the pie to see a more complete picture of the costs associated with a wide range of chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, depression, and hypertension. In the video further down this page, Ben describes the thinking driving the GE/Seed collaboration.

The Cost of Getting Sick: Click on the graphic to use the visualization tool, which combines 500,000 records from GE’s proprietary database with what’s known as MEPS, or the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. MEPS is a large-scale survey of patients, doctors and insurers and is the most complete source of data available on the cost and use of healthcare in the U.S.

As Ben explains below: “These are things that are actually affecting individual people. So you want to do more to actually put that personal side onto it — so that people can actually understand a little bit about the data for themselves rather than it being something that is obscure and limited to this much more specific [medical] audience.”

With four visualization tools in our series thus far — three from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Seed and another created by our friends at GOOD magazine GE’s goal is to help more people make sense of the vast amounts of data that are available. It’s hoped that the increased awareness that results will, in turn, drive increased access to care — which is one of the drivers of GE’s healthymagination strategy.

Try out our other visualization tools:

* 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
* GOOD’s World Health info-graphic shows the money 12 countries spend on healthcare

* Learn more about Ben and Seed Visualization
* Read “Visualizing world health with the data artists at GOOD” on GE Reports
* Learn more about our healthymagination business strategy