MARBLS: a visual environment for building clinical alert rules.

Physicians and nurses usually rely on hospital information systems (HIS) for detecting a variety of adverse clinical conditions and reminding repetitive treatments. However, the acquisition of alert rules expected by HIS from experts remains a challenging, error-prone, and time-consuming process. In this work, we present MARBLS (Medical Alert Rule BuiLding System) - a visual environment to facilitate the design and definition of clinical alert rules. MARBLS enables a two-way, synchronized visual rule workspace and visual query explorer. Monitoring rules can be built by manipulating block components in the rule workspace, by querying and generalizing region of interests in the visual query explorer via direct manipulations, or a combination of both. Informal testing with doctors has shown positive feedback.