If you work in healthcare analytics or want to build a real-world Power BI portfolio project, this tutorial walks you through building a fully interactive Canadian healthcare wait times dashboard from scratch using publicly available CIHI data.
This is not a toy dataset. The project uses real Canadian Institute for Health Information wait time data covering priority procedures across all provinces — the same data published on the official CIHI website, which we validate against directly in the tutorial.
What You Will Learn
This tutorial covers the complete Power BI workflow from raw data to finished dashboard:
- Importing and cleaning raw CIHI wait time data in Power Query
- Converting text-based time and indicator fields into numeric values
- Creating custom period types including Standard, Full Year, and COVID Extra periods
- Building DAX measures for benchmark analysis, 50th percentile, and 90th percentile calculations
- Designing an overview dashboard tracking percentage of patients treated within benchmark
- Building trend analysis pages and top procedure comparisons
- Creating matrix visuals at province and regional levels
- Using interactive bubble charts for deep-dive analytics
- Validating Power BI results against the official CIHI website
Who This Is For
This project is well suited for Power BI beginners and intermediate users looking to move beyond sample datasets, data analysts and BI developers working in Canadian healthcare, students building a portfolio with real public data, and anyone interested in understanding how Canadian healthcare wait time data is structured and analyzed.
Tools Used
Power BI, Power Query, DAX, and the CIHI Wait Times public dataset — all free and publicly available.
Tutorial Walkthrough
The full tutorial runs just over two hours and covers every step in detail. Here is what each section covers:
- 00:00 — Introduction and overview
- 06:43 — Walkthrough of the completed dashboard
- 17:27 — Validating Power BI numbers against the CIHI website
- 20:06 — Deep dive analytics using bubble charts and line charts
- 22:56 — Starting from scratch with raw data
- 25:26 — Data cleaning and Power Query transformations
- 38:53 — Building DAX measures for KPIs and benchmarks
- 53:35 — Building the overview dashboard
- 1:14:59 — Trend dashboard page
- 1:47:06 — Matrix table at province and regional level
- 1:53:52 — Advanced bubble chart analytics
- 2:09:51 — Final CIHI validation and closing remarks
Watch the Full Tutorial
If you found this useful, the full Power BI course covering this project and more is available at DataScientist.ca.
Category: Power BI Tutorials
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