OECD COUNTRIES’ HEALTHCARE EXPENDITURES IN TABLEAU VIZ

4 min readNov 28, 2020

(Link to my Tableau Viz: https://public.tableau.com/profile/nebile.kodaz#!/vizhome/Deneme1_16042839910380/OECDHEALTHCAREEXPENDITURE)

Since the coronavirus pandemic, people want to know more about healthcare systems and expenditures. In the Make Over Monday data project, the data set that is about health care expenditures from the OECD database has been shared to be visualized and to be reached to more people. This article is about Tableau visualization and insights from the data set.

OECD Data

The data set includes data from OECD countries since around the 1970s. It shows the expenditures have three sources; voluntary, out of pocket, and compulsory refunds. Also, the spendings are given in dollars per capita and the percentage of GDP. Some new OECD members have started to gather data lately so, in some years there are no observations for the health care spendings. The health funds for investment are not included in observations.

THE INSIGHTS FROM EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS

USA Healthcare Expenditures;

In this data visualization project, the first noticeable point was that the USA has been the country that spends on health mostly since 1970. It is one of the countries which have historical data since the beginning. It has boosted about 11K dollars from around 300 dollars by 2019. To specify more, the USA spends eight times more percentage from GDP on health than Indonesia that is the country spends only 2.7% of GDP on their health.

Top 5 Among OECD

Additionally, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands are in the top five countries in the ranking by the average percentage of GDP in the whole period. On the other hand, as the countries are ranked by expenditures in dollars per capita, Norway and the Netherlands replace with Canada and Denmark. The health care coverage and quality could not be interpreted with this data set. Health care might be expensive in some countries while cheaper in other countries.

Bottom 5 Among OECD

On the other hand, some countries allocate the lowest amount of money during the period according to the OECD dataset. Indonesia, India, China, Russia, and Romania are ranked at the bottom in terms of the average percentage of total health spending. These measurements are covering the total spending including, voluntary and compulsory payments for health.

Furthermore, Australia and Austria jumped up top-five rank as the average of money spent in dollars per capita by voluntarily. Greece also has a good rank for its voluntary health care costs per capita. Some east European countries and Turkey have the fewest voluntary spending on health.

ABOUT TABLEAU TIPS

Building this viz has provided me the chance of learning and practicing some Tableau tips that I did not use before. I will add some extra tips for the Tableau community to explain how I have built this viz about health care data from OECD.

I change the layout color for sheets, dashboard, and also text boxes on the dashboard. This viz is for a social data project so I can choose some fancy color rather than neutral colors for business.
I use the spatial data and map features to show a general view of OECD countries. I have used shapes customized by me. Also, I adjusted the size of shapes with measures.

I gave the OECD average in the period in the explanations in the text boxes on the dashboard. I added a comparison part at the bottom of the viz. I use legends as color. I rounded the bar charts. The line graph is used to show the timeline for health care spendings.

The latest design below. I leave the Tableau Public link also, so you can have your own data exploration journey on my viz. I improve my Tableau skills by building this viz. Moreover, I have created content during the global pandemic this year. People who want to learn about health care expenditures can analyze the OECD data as if they live in an OECD country like me. I am adding the source link below, thanks to the Make Over Monday team to manage this social data project.
Sources: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm