Visual Analytics of Electronic Health Records with a Focus on Time

Visual Analytics is a field of computer science that deals with methods to perform data analysis using both computer-based methods and human judgment facilitated by direct interaction with visual representations of data. Electronic health record systems that apply Visual Analytics methods have the potential to provide healthcare stakeholders with much-needed cognitive support in exploring and querying records. This chapter presents Visual Analytics projects addressing five particular challenges of electronic health records: (1) The complexity of time-oriented data constitutes a cross-cutting challenge so that all projects need to consider design aspects of time-oriented data in one way or another. (2) As electronic health records encompass patient conditions and treatment, they are inherently heterogeneous data. (3) Scaling from single patients to cohorts requires approaches for relative time, space efficiency, and aggregation. (4) Data quality and uncertainty are common issues that need to be considered in real-world projects. (5) A user-centered design process and suitable interaction techniques are another cross-cutting challenge for each and every Visual Analytics project.