Reporting, Visualization, and Dissemination
What the exam tests
Reporting, visualization, and dissemination tests whether you can choose displays, communicate uncertainty, protect privacy, and tailor reporting to audience and decision. Expect questions on charts, dashboards, reporting guidelines, plain language, and small-cell suppression.
Core rules
- Match chart to question: bars for comparisons, lines for trends, scatter for relationships, and funnel plots for institutional comparisons with varying denominators.
- Show denominators, units, time period, and uncertainty; avoid truncated axes that exaggerate differences.
- Risk-adjust when comparing providers; do not rank without confidence intervals.
- Suppress small cells under applicable privacy rules and avoid PHI in figures.
- Follow reporting guidelines and provide accessible labels, alt text, and color-safe palettes.
Worked example
A dashboard ranks hospitals by readmission rate. A small hospital with 20 discharges has 15% readmissions, while a large hospital has 12%. Ranking the small hospital last is misleading because its denominator is tiny. Use a funnel plot with expected rates and control limits, show denominators, and avoid a definitive rank unless differences exceed expected variation. The reasoning: visualization must represent sampling variability and case mix, not just the point estimate.
Traps
- Using 3D pie charts or dual axes that imply false relationships.
- Dropping zero-count categories and changing the story.
- Showing only relative changes without absolute counts.
- Including identifiable dates or rare diagnoses in public figures.