Analytical comparison of factors affecting EHR visualization for physicians in public health care units

Information visualization is a significant, measured and potential advantage of Electronic Health Records (EHR) for understanding patient data to physicians. Doctors take primarily interest in understanding a complete knowledge from different portions of visualization that is comprised of numbers, pictures, texts and colored icons. However, complex presentation due to non-identification of different knowledge driven factors in EHR tools results in lesser attraction for its daily use in public health care units. Understanding and analysis of these factors that affect the utilization and sole understanding of visualization in EHR by physicians is main issue. Based on previous work by different researchers in same domain, these factors are shortlisted and compared to analyze the use of such tools by doctors. A survey based questionnaire study with a group of doctors is conducted using a approach to understand the deficiency areas for EHR tools. This figure out the requirements and expectations of doctors with EHR that may also assist other stakeholders like database professionals and visualization designers to align the tools based upon physician's requirements. Results are analyzed based on feedback of doctors from emergency and outdoor departments of hospitals as they are first to deal with patients and their data in daily routine. Facts are represented in two different categories where first is mentioning the rate of knowledge skills of physicians about visualization and second is mentioning future expectations from such tools. Results concluded that EHR tools should facilitate in more insight about multiple patients history and more skills improvement is required for doctors to use such tools. This research paper is also an integral part of our ongoing effort for developing an integrated model, CARE1.0 that has been proposed in one of the previous work. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.