Fall 2017 SAVI Online Magazine Emagazine Fall 2017 FINAL | Page 11

SAVI Advanced allows you to explore and identify patterns and trends to guide your research or decision-
making in particular by allowing you to create Data Stories. Storytelling with data is an easy way to engage
with stakeholders to justify the need for a grant, demonstrate program impact, or share research findings.
You can build a narrative around your data, add interactive visualizations you create in SAVI-Advanced, and
share YOUR STORY online.
The first cohort of eight students
started the program in July.
The program builds on and expands
the Institute’s previous work in helping
students learn to use technology
to analyze data, and it will serve as
a model for training public health
professionals nationwide.
“The work we’re doing now
can be transferred to other states,
other regions,” Dixon says, “and go
well beyond just what we’re doing
in Indiana.”
The program is especially exciting,
according to Dixon, because it brings
together the work and research
of faculty across three partnering
institutions—the Regenstrief Institute,
the IU Fairbanks School of Public
Health, and the Indiana University
School of Medicine.
SAVI is vital to the synergies created
by that partnership, not only because
of the data it supplies but because of
the storytelling that it makes possible.
“It’s one thing to produce a map or a
chart,” Dixon says. “But if we’re going
to be effective in changing health care
policy, then we have to be able to tell
that through narrative. There needs
to be some story that connects it to
broader issues.”
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