A Visual Analytics Framework for Emergency Room Clinical Encounters

Abstract

High costs, lack of speed, non-intuitive interfaces, and inefficient, fragmented display of patient information have hindered the adoption of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Critical factors inhibiting adoption of the EMR include the time spent by the health care providers (HCP) in accessing and also documenting patient information during clinical encounters. We describe an emerging visual analytics system dedicated to clinical encounters in emergency room scenarios. It unifies all EMR information fragments into a single interactive visual framework, controlled by voice and touch, in which physicians can conduct diagnostic reasoning tasks in a direct data and information centric manner. We illustrate our system by ways of a typical clinical scenario and point out directions for future research and development.