Qlik Showcases Analytics Solution at Gartner BI Bake Off Investigating U.S. Life Expectancy

Qlik, along with Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI and SAP, were given identical datasets from the World Health Organization and the World Bank at the virtual event, where vendors were asked to investigate the predictors of life expectancy. The objective was to understand which variables have a positive impact on life expectancy and to identify efforts that can be made to impact those areas that have the most positive influence. The ultimate question? “What can governments and businesses do to improve population health as defined by high life expectancy?”

Danny Langley, Senior Solution Architect, and his UK counterpart, Bruno Calver, Principal Pre-Sales Solution Architect, represented Qlik. Over the course of several weeks, while also working their normal “day jobs,” they built a solution to answer this key question. The solution took advantage of many parts of the Qlik platform, from Qlik Catalog to Insight Advisor to Qlik Alerting, to name a few. Additionally, they took advantage of how easy it is to connect to multiple data sources in Qlik by loading in opioid datasets from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Center for Health Statistics, as well as COVID-19 datasets from John Hopkins University and Definitive Healthcare.

Here are some of Qlik’s findings from the Bake Off:

• In terms of life expectancy, the United States has lagged well behind advanced countries in the study over the last several years.
  • The highest variance in life expectancy between the United States and the other countries occurred in the last year from the dataset analyzed.
• The United States has the highest per capita health care expenditures and health expenditures as percent of GDP than any other country.
• Using a simple, built-in correlation function and Qlik’s Insight Advisor, Qlik Sense found that one of the biggest negatively correlating factors explaining life expectancy to be rates of mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes or chronic respiratory disease.
• Within recent years in the United States, opioid abuse may be a contributing factor to the recent decrease in life expectancies.
  • Qlik GeoAnalytics capabilities narrowed down geographic areas in the United States that had high rates of opioid-related deaths AND low life expectancies.
  • Qlik’s Associative Engine and GeoAnalytics revealed physicians in Kentucky who are prescribing far more than the average amount of drugs being prescribed by others in the eastern part of the state.
• Qlik global smart search and associative engine also determined that Kentucky lacked any counties with high life expectancies based on custom groupings created in Qlik’s data manager.
• Qlik Alerting was used to setup alerts on counties in Kentucky that had experienced a three-day rolling growth rate of COVID-19 above five percent AND a greater than 50 percent hospital bed utilization.

In the last, and arguably most exciting part of the BI Bake Off, vendors were asked to demonstrate any new future cool or innovative functionality. Here, Qlik unveiled its Active Metrics project. This project lets you move beyond dashboards by auto-creating personalized, metrics-based insights combined with automated actions and business workflow integration. Like a self-driving car, Qlik lets users take your hands completely off the wheel and points out things you should probably consider – but were unaware of – in your business. Furthermore, Qlik sets up alerts that automatically trigger workflows in your business…ultimately making your life MUCH easier and your business more informed.

Although this was a virtual stage presence for Qlik and its competitors, we are proud to have been a frequent flyer in this Bake-Off event and had a lot of fun showing off what we could do this year! To see Qlik’s complete BI Bake-Off demonstration, watch the video below.