Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer

Background

Cervical cancer is the fifth most common cause of cancer death among women worldwide, with more than 300,000 women dying from the disease every year. The Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer (ACPCC) is Australia’s leading organisation for cervical cancer prevention and, as such, offers services to implement, support, monitor and manage cervical cancer related health programs, including screening and vaccination. 

ACPCC approached Luminary to help determine the best way to present data from the ‘Cervical Cancer Elimination Progress Report’, which communicates the progress Australia is making towards the elimination of cervical cancer. Previously, the report had been produced annually as a PDF, however ACPCC wanted to provide the report in a new format that would allow policy-makers, clinicians and other stakeholders to more easily access the data they require. The aim was to ultimately host the report in a digital format.

What we did

For ACPCC’s first public facing Annual Statistics report, we wanted to focus on stories instead of hard statistics alone. By taking a narrative based approach in revealing data-led insights, a far greater audience is able to understand and interact with the data.

We started by determining the most valuable and feasible focus areas. We engaged key subject matter experts in interviews and facilitated multiple workshops to understand the issues and how to use the available data to support them.

We then structured each page design into key areas, including:

• a way to select from up to seven different focus areas
• a large card outlining a key insight (e.g. Screening participation is down 14% in regional areas) and basic infographic found in the data
• a relevant visualisation (e.g. an interactive map using colour to indicate participation rates across Victoria) to encourage further investigation.

This structure invites people to gradually move into statistical depth as they see fit. It maintains focus on what’s important, while allowing those who are interested to dig deeper. 

We needed to make sure information was easy to find and key statistical information was made highly visible to the user, so important information was given visual prominence. A drop-down menu also helps users avoid scrolling and enables them to quickly get access to page content.

Underlying technology

The client’s requirements necessitated a low budget CMS that would provide reliable security and enable content to be easily updated. It also needed to be easily extendable using free tools, highly customisable to accommodate different types of charts, and be able to import bulk data via API integrations. We selected Umbraco for the task – a cost effective open source CMS built on Microsoft’s .NET framework. Umbraco allowed us to use and customise existing tools, as well as develop our own CMS tools. 

We researched the available data visualisation tools to make sure we found a solution that supported the needs of the project. The software needed to be easy to use, output a variety of different chart and graph types, allow for user interactions, and be easily customised to support the look and feel of the brand.

Chart.js, an open-source JavaScript library for data visualisation, created an easy way to visually represent large data sets, was capable of configuring data in different ways, and provided the customisation we needed. Map charts were rendered with the Google Maps API, while for the tables, we customised Umbraco’s Tables tool to fit the client’s requirements.

Outcome

The outcome is a web-based report that makes the content more engaging and allows the user to quickly and easily zero in on their area of interest or speciality. Interactive graphs allow users to take a deeper dive into specific data sets and relevant trends, with snapshots of visual data that can easily be shared. The report is also now accessible across multiple devices. In addition, the new format makes the data much easier to update. Instead of generating multiple data visualisations each year, data can quickly be changed and generated. This facilitates access to far more up-to-date information and enables the data to be easily updated for future releases of the report.