The future of patient experience data at Nottinghamshire Healthcare
I’ve talked about my plans for patient experience data in quite a few different forums recently, but it just occurred to me that it isn’t written down anywhere. Anyone who’s spent any time with me in meetings will know I’m a stickler for writing things down, so here it is. I launched a Shiny application to explore our patient experience data about 6 years ago. It was pretty early days for Shiny and it seemed pretty whizzy and exciting at the time.
Adding line returns in RMarkdown in a loop
Another one that’s for me when I forget. The internet seems strangely reluctant to tell me how to do this, yet here it is buried in the answer to something else. Sometimes you are writing an RMarkdown document and wish to produce text with line returns between each piece. I can never work out how to do it. It’s very simple. Just two spaces and then \n. Like this ” \n”.
Producing RMarkdown reports with Plumber
I wasn’t going to post this until I got it working on the server but I’ve got the wrong train ticket and am stuck in London St Pancras until 7pm so I thought I’d be productive and put it up now. So I launched a new version of the patient experience dashboard. I forget if I mentioned it on here or not. I think not. It’s here http://109.74.194.173:8080/apps/SUCE/ and the code is here https://github.
Suppress console output with ggplot, purrr, and RMarkdown
So I posted a while back about producing several plots at once with RMarkdown and purrr and how to suppress the console output in the document. Well, I just spotted someone on Twitter having a similar problem and it turns out that the solution actually doesn’t work in ggplot! Interesting… For ggplot, you need to excellent function walk() which is like map() except it’s called for its side effects (like disk access) rather than for its output per se.
A world of #plotthedots and what else?
Reproduced above is a recent exchange on Twitter. I’d better open by saying this blog post is not impugning the work of Samantha Riley or any other plot the dots people. On the contrary, the whole #plotthedots movement is an important part of a cultural change that is happening within the NHS at the moment. But I would like to take up the rhetorical device Samantha uses, to explore the issues that we have understanding data in the NHS.
Citing R packages in RMarkdown
I haven’t really done much in the way of citing papers in the last couple of years, I’ve spent my time either messing around with Shiny servers or databases or writing RMarkdown reports- and being horribly ill, of course, haha!- see this blog, passim. Don’t worry, I’m as fit as a flea now 🙂 Anyway, I’ve been citing one or two papers today and I’ve found it very easy to cite both papers and R packages in RMarkdown, so I’m here to tell you not to ignore it because it’s too hard, just do it.
Dplyr function to replace nested ifelse (like SQL CASE WHEN)
I hate nested ifelse statements in R code. I absolutely hate them. They are just ugly and difficult to read. I found this lovely function in dplyr called case_when (which is like the SQL CASE WHEN if you know that) that banished them forever. It’s easier if I just show you (this is from the documentation) <pre class="brush: r; title: ; notranslate" title=""> x <- 1:50 case_when( x %% 35 == 0 ~ "fizz buzz", x %% 5 == 0 ~ "fizz", x %% 7 == 0 ~ "buzz", TRUE ~ as.
Data science accelerator lesson one- build a pipeline and ship the code!
My exciting news is that I was accepted onto the data science accelerator and have been doing it since late December. My project, basically, is all about using natural language processing to better understand the patient experience data that we collect (and, if I have time, the staff experience data too). Here are the goals: Using an unsupervised technique, generate a novel way of categorising the text data to give us a different perspective.
New Year’s post
So this is my annual New Year’s post, it’s an idea from David Allen that I’ve done before. 2018 was the year that I was finally (pretty much) better. I had my bowel and spleen removed in August 2017 and bled in quite a scary way, but by the time 2018 rolled around I was running 9 miles, building mileage ready for a marathon in May. It’s been a great year.
A tidy text talk and some stuff from my Shiny book
This is just a quick post to show some of the stuff that I’ve published/ presented/ put on GitHub recently. So my Shiny book, Web Application Development with R using Shiny, 3rd edition, is out, and I’ve forked the code from the publisher’s repository onto my own GitHub to make it easier to find. And I’ve got another book about Shiny out which is all about UI development with Shiny, and I’ve forked the code from that onto my GitHub, too