Scope of the possible with Power BI

Session materials

pdf slides

Previous attendees have said…

• 17 previous attendees have left feedback
• 100% would recommend this session to a colleague
• 88% said that this session was pitched correctly

Three random comments from previous attendees

• Fab intro into what Power BI can be used for. Brendan explained everything really well.
• Was interested in whether Power BI might be a useful way to provide access to our ‘siloed’ data to management. The answer is yes, if only NHS restrictions would allow us to use Power BI 😂
• Excellent session that removed the fear of giving Power BI a go

Session outline

• this session is a non-technical overview designed for service leads
• Why Power BI, and why this session?
• Power BI demo - build a simple dashboard
• Strengths and weaknesses
  • obvious
  • less obvious
• Alternatives
• Skill development

Power BI?

• newish (c.2015)
• based on Microsoft’s SQL reporting products
  • proprietary, closed-source, paid-for
• integrates functions from several other Microsoft data products (bits of Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery…)
• produces interactive dashboards

Why this session?

• there is a lot of fluff talked about Power BI
  • e.g. elaborate visualisations, fancy real-time data products…
• Power BI in general is promoted as a no-code tool
  • that’s just not true, as we’ll see
• Power BI has a sales-y focus
  • that conceals some of its most useful properties
• so Power BI, as a platform, requires some translation to the complicated reality of health and social care data
  • and Power BI offers real strengths in managing and exploiting our data, even when the pain-points are taken into account

Power BI demo

• using tidied of the GP practice size dataset from April 2024
  • GP practice size data
  • Demographic data

Note this data is cleaned

Name	PracticeListSize	Postcode	HBName	GPCluster	Code
Centenary Surgery	2457	ML5 4BY	NHS Lanarkshire	Coatbridge	61216
Glenluce Surgery	2170	DG8 0PU	NHS Dumfries and Galloway	Wigtownshire	18589
Shebburn Medical Practice	2802	DG2 8BY	NHS Dumfries and Galloway	Dumfries & Upper Nithsdale	18254

Load some data

Lots of different data loading options

Preview

Friendly tools for previewing data

Add to a map

Clever use of commercial postcode data

Add interactions

Visualisations are interactive

Publish

Add more visuals

30-odd built in, hundreds of free additional visuals, thousands of (often dodgy) commercial add-ins

Add more data

• we could add the health board names, to make our visual more useful
• we could also get GP practice demographics

Add more data

Totally different data, but harmonised process for loading

Re-shape that data

Neatly-integrated PowerQuery, gives loads of scope for tidying and fixing data

Data modelling tools

Full suite of relational tools for the more ambitious projects

Pre-packed visuals

Microsoft’s Tornado chart

Demographics

These can be cross filtered to give national/board/practice level insights

Strengths

• by far the easiest way of producing interactive data products
• great tools for tidying data
• good for iterative projects
• data hubbing / self-service data
• scaling
• potential to manage complex and sensitive data on existing infrastructure

Weaknesses

• really needs clean and tidy data
• publication can be complicated and expensive
• steepening pain curve. Easy to start projects, but more involved analysis is messy
• complex IG landscape
• messy skills development journey