Information Visualisation and the Electronic Health Record: Visualising Collections of Patient Histories from General Practice

Abstract

This thesis investigates the question: "How can we use information visualisation to support retrospective, explorative analysis of collections of patient histories?" Building on experience from previous projects, we put forth our answer to the question by making the following contributions: * Reviewing relevant literature. * Proposing a novel design for visual exploration of collections of histories, motivated in a specific problem within general practice health care and existing work in the field of information visualisation. This includes both presentation and interactive navigation of the data. * Describing a query language and associated algorithms for specifying temporal patterns in a patient history. * Developing an interactive prototype to demonstrate our design, and performing a preliminary case study. This case study is not rigorous enough to conclude about the feasibility of the design, but it forms a foundation for improvements of the prototype and further evaluation at a later stage. We envision that our design can be instrumental in exploring experiences in terms of treatment processes. In addition, we believe that the visualisation can be useful to researchers looking at data to be statistically evaluated, in order to discover new hypotheses or get ideas for the best analysis strategies. Our main conclusion is that the proposed design seems promising, and we will further develop our results through a research project during the summer and autumn of 2006.