Patient Dashboards of Electronic Health Record Data to Support Clinical Care: A Systematic Review

Visualisations in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are crucial for clinical care. Since clinicians need to quickly diagnose and treat their patients, having appropriate ways to visualise patients’ characteristics and issues documented in the EHR, can be instrumental. However, the existing literature has not yet summarised the characteristics and lessons learned from the studies on patient dashboards for clinical care. Our review analysed patient dashboards, that visualised EHR data to support clinical care, and which were evaluated with end-users. We read papers from Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualisation, and Medical Informatics, focusing on the user interfaces and the end-user evaluation results. From a set of 3545 articles, we selected 30 studies, which were analysed using Thematic Analysis. Results provide an understanding of the patient dashboard designs, the visualisation techniques employed, the data represented, as well as the lessons learned from this body work; which should contribute to future designs.