Level of detail navigation and visualization of electronic health records

Clinicians usually intend to get overall health status as well as specific health care information from patient's electronic health record (EHR). However, the amount of EHR data can be incredibly large, which makes it a very tedious and inefficient work for clinicians to extract valuable information. This paper first investigates the clinical relevance of EHR data content. Then it presents a Level of Detail (LOD) information navigation model, which classified patient's whole EHR into different detail levels according to their clinical relevance. A novel navigation and visualization method is brought forward based on this model. Finally, an application is designed and implemented based on this method. It can guide clinicians from summarized overview to detailed contents of the EHR smoothly. Both the evolution of specific health problems and other related EHR information can be visualized and located quickly.