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Writer's pictureTreelat Xue

Treelat's How To: Healthcare Data Breach Analysis

During week 4 of the Millennials and Data Think Like an Analyst program, the class was tasked with visualizing data breaches and hacks to date. After analyzing the data, it became clear that the healthcare industry is one of the most targeted industries. I also noticed that the Healthcare Industry is subject to privacy and data protection policies such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. I wanted to create a viz that focused on the data breaches overtime and also highlighted the dates that healthcare data protection policies were implemented. To accomplish this within my visualization, I had to float three sheets on top of each other and ensure that the data points aligned flawlessly. Below I’ve outlined the steps to achieve this.


First, I added the necessary data points for HIPAA to the original dataset. Next, I created the healthcare industry hacks timeline. This chart incorporates the year and count distinct of entities in order to create the line graph. Last, a filter for sector is added to only show healthcare hacks.

Following that, I created the HIPAA timeline sheet. To achieve this chart I placed Year on columns, and Details about each HIPAA update on Label on the Marks Card. The result is a very messy chart with a bunch of lines and words overlapping each other. However, this will soon be remedied by creating the third sheet.

The final sheet that will bring everything together requires two calculated fields to create the “buttons” that users will interact with. First, I created a calculated field (Years for Details) utilizing an IF statement to make any details about HIPAA that was not null return the year. This ensured that only the years with a HIPAA update or details would be represented in this sheet.

Then, I created a second calculated field (Color for Details) using another If statement to ensure that only details that were not null would get the value of 1 and everything else would get a 0. This is important because we only want HIPAA events to be represented when we apply a color, while everything else must remain white.

Last, I placed the Year on columns, Years for Details on Label on the Marks Card (changed it to attribute), and Color for Details on color on the Marks Card (changed it to discrete).

Now to make the final chart, I made sure each worksheet being used had a worksheet background color of “None”. Then, I placed the floating sheets on top of each other with the hacks timeline on the bottom, followed by the HIPAA timeline, and last the interactive “buttons” sheet is laid on top. The trick here is to make sure that the years line up between all three sheets so that it looks as if it is one worksheet.

Last, to make it interactive, I simply added a dashboard action filter with the buttons worksheet as the source sheet and the HIPAA timeline as the target sheet. The action was set to run on Select and clearing the selection excluded all values. I also specified the selected field as Year.

Below is the final interactive version. I truly enjoyed this week’s project and can’t wait for more #MAD fun. Thanks for reading!

Click to View the Dashboard on Tableau Public

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