ClinicalVis: Supporting Clinical Task-Focused Design Evaluation

TL;DR

ClinicalVis is an open-source visualization tool designed to improve task-focused evaluation of healthcare providers' interactions with electronic health records, aiding decision-making in intensive care settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces ClinicalVis, a novel visualization prototype for task-specific EHR evaluation, and provides empirical insights from a user study with healthcare professionals.

Findings

Improved usability and confidence in treatment decisions.

Preferences for specific EHR data presentation styles.

Design implications for future clinical EHR interfaces.

Abstract

Making decisions about what clinical tasks to prepare for is multi-factored, and especially challenging in intensive care environments where resources must be balanced with patient needs. Electronic health records (EHRs) are a rich data source, but are task-agnostic and can be difficult to use as summarizations of patient needs for a specific task, such as "could this patient need a ventilator tomorrow?" In this paper, we introduce ClinicalVis, an open-source EHR visualization-based prototype system for task-focused design evaluation of interactions between healthcare providers (HCPs) and EHRs. We situate ClinicalVis in a task-focused proof-of-concept design study targeting these interactions with real patient data. We conduct an empirical study of 14 HCPs, and discuss our findings on usability, accuracy, preference, and confidence in treatment decisions. We also present design implications that our findings suggest for future EHR interfaces, the presentation of clinical data for task-based planning, and evaluating task-focused HCP/EHR interactions in practice.