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
- Perfect introduction in to what Power BI is and what it can be used for without delving into the topic too heavily. Would be very keen to attend beginner training in the future so will keep an eye out for this!
- 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 😂
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 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Carmondean Medical Group | 9942 | EH54 8PY | NHS Lothian | West Lothian East | 78010 |
Davidson’s Mains Medical Centre | 6014 | EH4 5BP | NHS Lothian | Edinburgh North West - Tower | 70709 |
Bankhouse Medical Practice | 6056 | ML6 6DB | NHS Lanarkshire | Airdrie | 61151 |
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