DBA\'s Perspective on Use of Information Visualization in Electronic Health Records

Abstract

DBA's perspective for Information Visualization (IV) assists in providing a detailed insight about patient history in Electronic Health Records (EHR). These data visualizations are used by different stake holders in public hospitals such as Doctors, Database Administrators (DBA) and visual designers in order to improve health services for patients. This is not possible without the contribution of DBAs, who are directly involved in launching efficient query system and required data retrieval for resulting visualization. EHR database is comprising of different forms of data i.e., numbers, texts, pictures and graphs resulting in a challenge for creating a meaningful visualization for single or multiple patients. DBAs have EHR knowledge gaps, lesser exposure to the transformation process of data into effective visualization and understanding about IV limitations result in poor and less efficient IV tools. This study highlights the challenging factors that affect DBAs in understanding, developing and controlling EHR visualization. These factors are selected after a literature review and further analysis by a questionnaire based study on DBAs in two different government hospitals. This will help in highlighting the limitations of DBAs skills and experience and assist in determining the contribution of their role in the development of future IV applications. This work is a second phase of our ongoing research for designing a model, CARE 1.0, as a future IV solution in multiple EHR.