How HCCI Uses Data to Reach Media and Policymakers

Like many research-driven organizations, Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) had long publicized their work through a mixture of static PDF reports and public use files. But by late 2018, they were striving to tell more immersive stories with their data.

Armed with a small team, HCCI first turned to Tableau as their tool of choice for creating interactive data viz. But Tableau proved clunky when embedded in their website and the visualizations it produced lacked design polish. It was time for a change in strategy.

By 2021, HCCI had been named a finalist for the NIHCM Foundation's Digital Media Award, alongside media giants with heralded graphics teams like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Reuters. They were able to garner press coverage across local news and broadcasting stations and their research went viral among health care researchers and policymakers on Twitter. Here’s how they did it.

As a non-profit research group that studies the US health care market, HCCI is focused on making health care data accessible, transparent and easy to understand, so that stakeholders can to drive improvements on key issues. Press coverage and social media traction are two important ways the organization measures success of those efforts, both internally and with their funders.

In 2020, HCCI teamed up with researchers from Duke University’s Margolis Center for Health Policy and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina to create a comprehensive view of health care spending in the state of North Carolina. Their objective was to use this research to inform local legislators, health care professionals and members of the press.

This meant they had to reach key press and social media targets to demonstrate the impact of their research to potential donors.

HCCI's study population consisted of about 6.3 million North Carolina residents annually, out of the state's population of 10.2 million. Given the technical nature of the research, one of HCCI's biggest challenges was finding ways to compile and visualize the data in a clear and insightful way.

HCCI’s data visualization challenge:

With such a large amount of insights, it became clear that HCCI needed both an explanatory and exploratory component to the experience; one to "hook" readers and showcase some of the top findings, and the other to entice them to dive deeper into the data.

The story was therefore divided into two sections: a "scrollytelling" piece that would introduce the project and highlight key takeaways from the research; and a dashboard that would enable deep exploration into health care spending in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties.

Solution 1: Explanatory storytelling through interactive visuals

The first part of the project was a beautiful, visual essay that walked readers through major findings from the research. It featured plenty of interactivity, scrollytelling, and downloadable content.

Launch Report

This chart, in particular, took some careful consideration. The goal was to show the distribution of per-person spending across counties for different payer populations.

HCCI also wanted a way of determining which dots mapped to which counties. This was achieved through some clever interactivity, highlighting and linking dots from the same county on hover.

Solution 2: Exploratory deep dive dashboard

HCCI didn’t just want to get people’s attention. They also wanted to entice them to interact with the findings, and learn more.

Launch dashboard

The dashboard at the end allows the reader to dig deeper into spending data for a particular county, making it easy for legislators to understand how their own constituents are faring.

The default view of the dashboard gives readers a sense of the geographic distribution of per-person health care spending. They can also drill down by payer type or service category.

Then, by zooming in on a particular county, the reader has access to more granular data like:

• The payer type population breakdown
• Per-person spending by payer type
• The percentage of spending derived from inpatient, outpatient, and professional care.

Ultimately, the output was heralded by researchers and HCCI's funders alike. It generated buzz on Twitter and calls for research into health care markets in other states. It also produced placements in target local newspapers and broadcasting stations, spreading awareness of the research to different audiences across North Carolina.

In February 2021, the project was named one of ten finalists for NICHM Foundation's Digital Media Award, which recognizes "excellence in digital media that improves understanding of health care topics." It was a testament to how far HCCI's data storytelling efforts had come in two short years.