Visualizing Daily Hospital Routine

Abstract

Introduction Hospitals, just like other businesses with a comparatively complex organizational structure, are often confronted with analyzing and evaluating complex sets of data that are hard to monitor. Standardized forms of presentation (e.g., pie or bar charts) are frequently used for the visual analysis and presentation of data in such cases. From a visual communication perspective, the potential that visualization offers has not been exhausted. Collaboration between statisticians and designers—with the pooling of themespecific practical and creative competences—is therefore a worthwhile objective. The research project, “Visual Atlas of the Daily Hospital Routine,”1 joins these competences to research the options of alternative forms of visualization of complex sets of data for process optimization. The specialist department for quality management of the Bern University Hospital Inselspital (Annekathi Bischoff), which provided the data for this research project from four selected sub-processes, is a contact point for quality management issues for the entire hospital. During process optimization, the goal is to analyze and optimize hospital-internal procedures. For data collection, qualitative procedures are often applied, including field research, participatory observation, and interviews. For purposes of analysis and evaluation, standardized quantitative representation models (e.g., bar graphs) are almost exclusively used. The visualization of qualitative data, in contrast, is hardly considered significant. As a sub-discipline of visual communication, “Knowledge Visualization”2 generates context-specific visual representations of quantitative and qualitative data. The goal of the visual representation is to provide access to complex sets of data, often with great advantages over linguistic or standardized visual representation models. Edward Tufte describes this potential as follows: “Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers—even a very large set—is to look at pictures of those numbers.”3 The viewing of such images can help to present work processes more clearly and thereby to analyze procedures and manage them more efficiently. The goal of this research project was to develop alternative presentation forms for four organizational and communicative sub-processes in the environment of the Inselspital. As a secondary means of analysis, the images developed in the project were