Scope of the possible with Power BI
Power BI
overview
Session materials
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
- Great session to cover the basics
- It was great to get a more detailed look at what the possible limitations are when considering Power BI
- Informative session about the scope of power bi - useful demos and links to further development sessions. Easy to follow.
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
Name | PracticeListSize | Postcode | HBName | GPCluster | Code |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
St Luke’s Medical Practice | 11228 | ML8 4BA | NHS Lanarkshire | Clydesdale | 62223 |
The Cairntoul Practice | 2339 | G14 0XT | NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde | NW - Great Western | 40493 |
Barbauchlaw Medical Practice | 17280 | EH48 3QB | NHS Lothian | West Lothian West | 78241 |
Load some data
Preview
Add to a map
Add interactions
Publish
Add more visuals
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
Re-shape that data
Data modelling tools
Pre-packed visuals
Demographics
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