About

About Delgam

Delgam gathers what US hospitals say in public about the space they plan to build, and sets it beside what they report running. It holds 1,125 filings from 42 states and the District of Columbia (certificate of need applications, master plans, environmental reviews and board items) with 6,521 figures read from them, and the fiscal year 2023 Medicare cost reports of 6,046 hospitals. It leads with findings rather than a search box, and every number on it comes from that database through one export script; the methods say how.

Its graphics follow a line that runs from Isotype, the picture statistics made in Vienna between the world wars, with pictograms by Gerd Arntz, to the explanatory graphics desks of newspapers such as The New York Times. The habits it borrows: say the finding first and let the chart prove it; show counts as things a reader can see; keep the population grey and mark the subject in one color; label marks directly instead of sending readers to a legend.

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