Extracting Insights from Electronic Health Records: Case Studies, a Visual Analytics Process Model, and Design Recommendations

• Published in: Journal of medical systems Vol. 35; no. 5; pp. 1135 - 1152
• Main Authors: Wang, Taowei David, Wongsuphasawat, Krist, Plaisant, Catherine, Shneiderman, Ben
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.10.2011; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Automatic Data Processing; Case studies; Data Display; Data visualization; Design engineering; Electronic Health Records; Extraction processes; Health Informatics; Health Sciences; Humans; Mathematical analysis; Medical; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Original Paper; Physicians; Software Design; Statistics for Life Sciences; Temporal logic; User-Computer Interface; Visual; Visual aids; Information visualization; Computer graphics [L01.224.108]; Medical records [L01.280.900.968]; Computer-assisted decision making [L01.700.508.100]; User-computer interface [L01.224.900.910]
• ISSN: 0148-5598; 1573-689X
• DOI: 10.1007/s10916-011-9718-x

Current electronic health record (EHR) systems facilitate the storage, retrieval, persistence, and sharing of patient data. However, the way physicians interact with EHRs has not changed much. More specifically, support for temporal analysis of a large number of EHRs has been lacking. A number of information visualization techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem. Unfortunately, due to their limited application to a single case study, the results are often difficult to generalize across medical scenarios. We present the usage data of Lifelines2 (Wang et al. 2008 ), our information visualization system, and user comments, both collected over eight different medical case studies. We generalize our experience into a visual analytics process model for multiple EHRs. Based on our analysis, we make seven design recommendations to information visualization tools to explore EHR systems.