Healthcare Data Visualization: Geospatial and Temporal Integration
February 16, 2022
As electronic healthcare systems are being fully integrated nationally, the effective visualization of large and complex healthcare data becomes increasingly desirable for timely decision making (Grossman et al., 2011). The problem, however, is very challenging for several reasons: 1) Health data is a data-rich, information-poor domain. In Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, data are almost always heterogeneous, unstructured, hierarchical, and longitudinal. 2) EHR systems are large. While it is possible to visualize an EHR system in small scales with a focused scope, high impact knowledge discoveries may come from population-wide visualization and knowledge mining. 3) Visualizing population-level health data often involves presenting geospatial and time-series data in a common visual context. This presents a challenge in visual encoding of the information space.
