More Text Please! Understanding and Supporting the Use of Visualization for Clinical Text Overview

Clinical practice is heavily reliant on the use of unstructured text to document patient stories due to its expressive and flexible nature. However, a physician's capacity to recover information from text for clinical overview is severely affected when records get longer and time pressure increases. Data visualization strategies have been explored to aid in information retrieval by replacing text with graphical summaries, though often at the cost of omitting important text features. This causes physician mistrust and limits real-world adoption. This work presents our investigation into the role and use of text in clinical practice, and reports on efforts to assess the best of both worlds---text and visualization---to facilitate clinical overview. We report on insights garnered from a field study, and the lessons learned from an iterative design process and evaluation of a text-visualization prototype, MedStory, with 14 medical professionals. The results led to a number of grounded design recommendations to guide visualization design to support clinical text overview.