BACKGROUND:  As the occurrences of chronic illnesses increase, patients need to become more involved in managing their medical history. Unfortunately, the concept of patient-centric medical records has yet to be fully achieved because current medical record displays are designed solely for physicians or caregivers who have extensive background knowledge in the area. Using current record displays, the amount of information available to the patient at a given time could cause information overload. In addition, the lack of tools to easily manipulate the data prevents patients from fully utilizing available information to make decisions about their medical care.

INNOVATION:  Researchers at UCLA have developed software that is capable of integrating underlying medical data and presenting the information in a way that enhances the patient's ability to navigate and understand the data. The main component of the invention is the "visualization dictionary." As the patient interacts with the interface, the visualization dictionary makes decisions whether a piece of information is relevant to a given medical problem based on its own knowledge base, number of data elements related to the problem, and frequency and recency of events.

POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS 

• Software can be deployed as a web-based application and used to interface with web-based data health repositories
• An adaptive interface that assists patients in navigating, manipulating and understanding their own medical records to encourage patients to actively participate in their own care
• Useful at large institutions as well as smaller private practices

ADVANTAGES

• Novel automated method for presenting and manipulating medical data
• Medical data presented in a more intuitive, easy to understand format that prevents information overload
• "Visualization dictionary" makes suggestions as to what pieces of information are relevant to the patient
• Guides patients through retrieving, querying, and filtering information from their own medical records using the underlying knowledge base
• Provides immediate visual feedback to queries posed by the patient by integrating information from the knowledge base and external resources (e.g., Medline)
• Temporal, spatial, and causal trends and relationships documented in the patient's record are automatically highlighted and presented in an interactive, visual manner
• Visually magnifies subtle aspects of the diagnostic, therapeutic and patient management that would otherwise be difficult to notice
• Patients and their families can be more informed about their options before arriving at the clinic
• More sophisticated method of presenting patient information compared to other interfaces

DEVELOPMENT-TO-DATE:  A software prototype called the "visual query interface" is being developed and a pilot evaluation using this software is being conducted on a group of patients who have been diagnosed with primary brain tumors

Related Papers (Selected)

• Hsu W, & Bui AA. A framework for visually querying a probabilistic model of tumor image features. AMIA Annual Symposium proceedings. 2006:354-8. [more]
• Bui AA, Aberle DR, & Kangarloo H. TimeLine: visualizing integrated patient records. IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine. 2007;11(4):462-73. [more]
• Hsu W, Aberle DR, El-Saden SM, Kangarloo H., Bui AAT. A visual query application for interacting with a probabilistic model of tumor image features. RSNA Annual Meeting. 2007:675.

Reference: UCLA Case No. 2008-313