Data visualization techniques to showcase nursing care quality

Data visualization is creating images that can help explain, explore, and report multivariate, multidimensional data.^{1, 2} Simple shapes and colors, alone or in combination, have been used by nurses to convey powerful healthcare quality information beginning with the famous Scutari pie charts of Florence Nightingale.^{3, 4} Today, nurses leverage computer science, statistics, and clinical expertise for visualization development and interpretation and human visual perception to identify salient (obvious) distributions, patterns, or relationships in the data.^{1, 2} The purpose of this article is to showcase data visualization techniques that have been used with nursing data sets to explore nursing care quality.