A timeline model for clinical events: empowering data

Abstract

Data visualization is key in the Big Data context, enabling different cognitive perspectives over large datasets. These visual perspectives can prompt relevant advantages with regard to healthcare records, because they may contribute to a faster, more understandable, and adequate way to capture patients’ health history and overall condition, thus improving healthcare quality.Timelines are well-known visual artifacts that help healthcare professionals to visualize patients’ electronic health records (EHR) over a time period. As data stored in EHR tend to quickly grow with each interaction between patient and healthcare system both number and size, traditional linear timelines are can increasingly become more difficult to manage visually, as they often span over different screens. Considering that a holistic analysis is desirable to provide proper and quality health services, data visualization should enable a seamless understanding of patients’ health history and overall condition. When dealing with critical episodes - such as an emergency - where time is an important factor, this is even more decisive. Furthermore, traditional timelines do not support multidimensional data representation. This paper presents a new visual model of time-dependent EHR based on radial models. It is capable of simultaneously displaying several data categories that characterize patients’ medical history, enabling medical professionals to be aware of different data categories over time in a single display, without the need to scroll between screens.