Introduction

I really enjoy learning from Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He is one of the good guys. He is articulate, insightful and delivers a huge amount of medical knowledge to all of us with excellent diction, clarity and compassion.

A few minutes ago I watched him in this video talking about medical mistakes and how hospitals are trying to limit the mistakes they make. The clip is only 1.5 minutes long but is really worth watching.

I happen to know first-hand how mistakes are made and inappropriate treatments given to patients, and what impacts can result from these situations. Hearing him discuss these topics sent me back in time, to about 3-4 years ago, when I had some of the best days of my life. What I learned during those days remains embedded in my brain. Every once in a while, these thoughts come to the forefront and I think back upon how the power of analytics can be used to address these issues.

Going to Mini Medical School

Over 3 years ago I had the best professional experience of my life. I got to work with years worth of real medical data. I also got to interface with an unbelievably brilliant chief medical officer. If I could bottle up the lessons learned and sell the insights, I’d be a guy that would now be retired.

I studied, learned, and did a couple of years of analytics on this data. I even wrote an article that had to be intentionally empty but just expressed my passion for this work. It was one of those articles that could be a 5-part series but it is also one in which I cannot discuss.

The Explorer

Well, tonight I published a new Tableau public workbook that gives me the capability of easily exploring every article I have ever written, including the complete time series history of how each article has been viewed. I was interested in seeing if anyone had ever read the plain-jane medical article I wrote about the passion I had for that work.

I was surprised by result, as shown in Figure 1. The fact that people are still reading this gives me hope that this analytical concept will be discovered by people that can make good use of it.

Figure 1 – The time series history of one article I wrote to express my passion for some work I was doing at the time (click for larger view).

Somehow in March of 2016, this article experienced a bit of traffic. How or why this happened, I have no idea. That fact that it did happen, gives me hope.

Final Thoughts

Although I could give you an easy link to the article, I invite you to try the explorer on your own. You can type the word “medical” in the the search box (Figure 2) of the dashboard and then click the blue “Read Article” link (Figure 3) when you highlight over the name. Go ahead, give it a try and see what you can learn today.

Figure 2 – Type the word medical in the search title box and then click on the article title to  select it.

Figure 3 – Click the blue Read Article link the shows up when you select the article name.