Visualisation of Integrated Patient-Centric Data as Pathways: Enhancing Electronic Medical Records in Clinical Practice

Abstract

Abstract. Routinely collected data in hospital Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is rich and abundant but often not linked or analysed for purposes other than direct patient care. We have created a methodology to integrate patient-centric data from different EMR systems into clinical pathways that represent the history of all patient interactions with the hospital during the course of a disease and beyond. In this paper, the literature in the area of data visualisation in healthcare is reviewed and a method for visualising the journeys that patients take through care is discussed. Examples of the hidden knowledge that could be discovered using this approach are explored and the main application areas of visualisation tools are identified. This paper also highlights the challenges of collecting and analysing such data and making the visualisations extensively used in the medical domain. This paper starts by presenting the state-of-the-art in visualisation of clinical and other health related data. Then, it describes an example clinical problem and discusses the visualisation tools and techniques created for the utilisation of these data by clinicians and researchers. Finally, we look at the open problems in this area of research and discuss future challenges.

How can Big Data Analytics Support People-Centred and Integrated Health Services: A Scoping Review

“…The algorithms shall separate low dimensional, unlabelled samples to find a hidden structure represented by the deduction of as many reasonable distinctive classes as possible [ 7 ]. Humans are normally reintegrated during the process of data interpretation, which is supported by visualizing the results using graphical models [ 62 63 ].…”

Clinical and operational insights from data-driven care pathway mapping: a systematic review

“…Basole et al [60,61], utilizing toolbox of Kumar et al [62] Bettencourt-Silva et al [63,64] Visualisation of patient pathways filtered and/or aggregated according to biomarkers and clinical characteristics Caballero et al [65] Combine visualisation of biomarkers and conformance analysis against guidelines across patient derived care pathways Ozkaynak et al [66] Variations in workflow according to triage acuity across multiple sites determined using transition matrix representations of visualised derived care pathways Perer et al [67] Huang et al [68] Sankey diagrams used to present association of care pathways with prescriptions [67] and comorbidities and complications [68] Zhang and Padman [69] Zhang et al [70] Dagliati et al [18,71] Najjar et al [72] Nuemi et al [73] Representative care pathways visualised from clustering derived care pathways. Enhanced with comorbidity data [70,72], correlated with biomarkers [18,71], or across multiple sites [73] Page such as biomarkers.…”

Analysis of low resource setting referral pathways to improve coordination and evidence-based services for maternal and child health in Ethiopia

“…CP helps to bring the whole treatment of a special disease in one concrete setting [21][22][23]. CP also implemented by tracing historical record and has effective for improving outcomes, reducing delay and cost, as described in [24][25][26][27][28]. In all, clinical decision support in CPs has largely been implemented to manage the quality of the care process (Chawla et al 2016) [29] but are often out of reach for developing countries.…”