The Five W's for Information Visualization with Application to Healthcare Informatics

The Five W's is a popular concept for information gathering in journalistic reporting. It captures all aspects of a story or incidence: who, when, what, where, and why. We propose a framework composed of a suite of cooperating visual information displays to represent the Five W's and demonstrate its use within a healthcare informatics application. Here, the who is the patient, the where is the patient's body, and the when, what, why is a reasoning chain which can be interactively sorted and brushed. The patient is represented as a radial sunburst visualization integrated with a stylized body map. This display captures all health conditions of the past and present to serve as a quick overview to the interrogating physician. The reasoning chain is represented as a multi-stage flow chart, composed of date, symptom, data, diagnosis, treatment, and outcome. Our system seeks to improve the usability of information captured in the electronic medical record (EMR) and makes ample use of popular hierarchical medical codes, such as ICD9 and CPT, for information organization. We show via multiple examples that our framework can significantly lower the time and effort needed to access the medical patient information required to arrive at a diagnostic conclusion.