A Visual Analytics Design for Connecting Healthcare Team Communication to Patient Outcomes

Communication among healthcare professionals (HCPs) is crucial for thequality of patient treatment. Surrounding each patient's treatment,communication among HCPs can be examined as temporal networks, constructed fromElectronic Health Record (EHR) access logs. This paper introduces a visualanalytics system designed to study the effectiveness and efficiency of temporalcommunication networks mediated by the EHR system. We present a method thatassociates network measures with patient survival outcomes and deviseseffectiveness metrics based on these associations. To analyze communicationefficiency, we extract the latencies and frequencies of EHR accesses. Ourvisual analytics system is designed to assist in inspecting and understandingthe composed communication effectiveness metrics and to enable the explorationof communication efficiency by encoding latencies and frequencies in aninformation flow diagram. We demonstrate and evaluate our system throughmultiple case studies and an expert review.