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Include few paragraphs that reflects on changes you made since the completion of Part II.
You can specifically break out your design decisions here, or include it under Changes made since Part II and delete this section. Talk about the design decisions you had to make along the way, and reflect on anything in particular that stands out to you that you learned working through the process. Include any other information that helps round out your data story.
Some of the design decisions I made in these project were out of necessity ill go through those first. The bit I wanted to do with GIS had to be cut significantly I ran into a lot of problems with the software over the last two week and it was a bit of a long shoot to get a scrolling graph of county drive times to a hosptial especially credit wise on GIS it would have probably instantly drained my GIS just to do the network analysis alone for that. So I scaled it back and followed a log of an old project I did to make a similar visualization but at the state scale to show lack of driving access. I would have loved to do a scrolling graph like the wealth one we looked at in class but that became nearly impossible for me to figure out or accomplish.
Other final design decisions that I made firstly I worked on the naming conventions of my visualizations made them better as they were pretty bad before this was the first thing I had to do even though now they are pretty on the nose to what the graph is showing. The second design decision I made was to keep the visualizations at a fairly simple but not overly simple level. Policy makers would should easily be able to understand the graphs especially the bar graphs of the counties. Making it overly simple may have turned policy makers away and removing too many of the counties would have painted an incomplete picture of the what was going on.
One thing design wise I had to do on the data side was hand make a good amount of my data. The data I had found was good but there we fields that I needed that I did not have access to. I had to hand make fields for differentiating between rural and urban using a map from the Ohio department of health and looking for county data on hospitals to merge into the data set. This was also a very large data set that has about 200 columns so combing through and finding the fields I needed when doing visuals and tablaeu was tough in the end but I found the fields I wanted to include one way or another.
When I was thinking about the audience for this project I had a few things in mind. The first one that came to my mind is that it should focus on the healthcare companies as they are the ones who have the infrastructure and they are the ones providing the service. Then I thought well that may be true but they are also the ones who I know are part of the problem they are the ones choosing not to work in these areas. So, then I thought if it can not be them I will think bigger and that what I did I want this to be something that a policy maker at the state level in Ohio would look at and think wow we have a problem here. I want the policy makers to sit and think these statisitics and the anecdote specifically are impactful. I want them to come away thinking maybe we are not doing enough for the state of Ohio when it comes to rural health. I want the policy makers who represent especially the red swathes on the one visualization to go what more can I do for my constituents. This is how I came to choose my audience because these are the people who can drive change on the issue.
I made a few adjustments to the final version by trying to make my visualization highlight several lenses of the issue. I wanted to show there are many areas where hospitals are limited where rural clinics are limited but beyond that to show we do not have access specifically to primary care. Not everyone can maybe view the issue as bad by showing limited amount of hospitals but everyone has went to the doctor they know what a primary care physician is and they can hopefully envision why its a problem when there are not many in an area.
Countyhealthrankings.org https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/ Policymap.org https://www.policymap.com/ Ohioruralhealth.org https://www.ohioruralhealth.org/ Calhospital.org https://calhospital.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/California-Rural-Health-Transformation-Program-Briefing-March-2026.pdf Ruralhealthinfo.org https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/healthcare-access Odh.ohio.gov https://odh.ohio.gov/know-our-programs/violence-injury-prevention-program/drug-overdose/ CDC.gov https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2025/25_0202.htm
AI was only used for me to get embeds to work and to ask how to complete certain tasks in Tablaeu or GIS or send me to resources to do that.
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I wish I had more time and or took this class earlier on in my Heinz journey. One of the main issues I ran into that that I had my capstone running concurrently with this class which meant I could not spend near the time I would have like working especially on my final project for this class. I would have loved to do a deeper look into the statistics of the population density that live in the red areas of the map but this is something that on a smaller scale took me four hours to do when I did it a different time and it took me three hours of waiting to just get GIS to work at all for my one GIS visual. So I would have loved to spend more time on that to export a data set into tablaue but that not how the cards fell for me during this project.
On another topic I thought this class gave me a decent understanding of how to use tablaeu and create better data visualizations especially as a person who is fairly new to making such things without having a clear guide to do so.