Proposal of Relevant Information Visualization for a Universal Viewer in Oncology.

Medical information, such as physicians' descriptions, nursing records, and various examination reports, is stored separately in the subsystems of an electronic medical record (EMR). To provide efficient treatment, health professionals require a universal viewer that collectively organizes and visualizes this distributed information at each clinical phase (i.e., first outpatient visit, treatment, follow-up observation, etc.). This research investigates a method to enable physicians to easily browse relevant information at each clinical phase, and to reflect and verify information in a universal viewer. We analyzed the patterns of picture archiving and communication system (PACS) reference logs and EMR performed orders to identify relevant information. We found that by considering the locations of display terminals in addition to disease types (clinical departments) and clinical phases, more relevant information could be identified, and the contents displayed on a universal viewer were improved accordingly.