The Five Ws for Information Visualization with Application to Healthcare Informatics

Abstract

The Five Ws is a popular concept for information gathering in journalistic reporting. It captures all aspects of a story or incidence: who, when, what, where, and why. We propose a framework composed of a suite of cooperating visual information displays to represent the Five Ws and demonstrate its use within a healthcare informatics application. Here, the who is the patient, the where is the patient's body, and the when, what, why is a reasoning chain which can be interactively sorted and brushed. The patient is represented as a radial sunburst visualization integrated with a stylized body map. This display captures all health conditions of the past and present to serve as a quick overview to the interrogating physician. The reasoning chain is represented as a multistage flow chart, composed of date, symptom, data, diagnosis, treatment, and outcome. Our system seeks to improve the usability of information captured in the electronic medical record (EMR) and we show via multiple examples that our framework can significantly lower the time and effort needed to access the medical patient information required to arrive at a diagnostic conclusion.

Innovative information visualization of electronic health record data: a systematic review

“…One study reported training time of 6 minutes for its visualization, which used radial displays with a body map in the center of the radius and the relevant physiological parameters highlighted on the body map. 36 This was the shortest training time reported; the longest was a half hour. 30…”

“…Some of the articles describe systems for data visualization, for example, LifeLines2 and VISITORS. Others use visualization techniques such as sequential displays, 31 , 36 treemaps, 28 , 30 radial displays, 34 , 36 , 38 or icicle trees. 31…”

Conceptual Models in Health Informatics Research: A Literature Review and Suggestions for Development

“…The visualization of knowledge is a field of study in its own right, and you may find it helpful to consult general works [ 39 , 40 ]. Although the visualization of data has become an active health informatics research area [ 41 , 42 ], the visualization of concepts is a very different order of activity.…”

Sequence Braiding: Visual Overviews of Temporal Event Sequences and Attributes

“…As our domain case study is related to type 1 diabetes, we should point out the survey of electronic health record visualizations by Rind et al [42] and the five Ws for healthcare informatics visualization [65]. However, as SEQUENCE BRAIDING is a general-purpose event sequence and attribute visualization, we will not further detail less relevant domain visualizations.…”