Automated Visual Presentations for Patient Medical Records Michelle X. Zhou Steven K. Feiner

MedAide is developed as the graphics generator component in MAGIC. MedAide is able to automatically generate visual presentations to present a patient's information summary to caregivers. In the course of the generation, MedAide actively communicates with other media generators (e.g., speech generator) through a media coordinator component and is able to modify its graphical decisions at the request of other media so that a coherent multimedia presentation can be ultimately produced. Since different caregivers have different information-seeking goals, therefore, they have different request of information presentation. To customize the presentation to a specific group of users is one of the goals in MedAide. Next, we will show how the presentation differs while different audience presents.

Physician

Nurse

Present Patient Information to Nurses

The currently generated multimedia presentation presents a patient's information to a nurse. In our current scenario a patient has just undergone cardiac bypass surgery and will soon be sent to the cardiac ICU. To prepare for the patient's arrival, the nurse at the ICU needs to be told certain information: what happened during the operation, what types of treatment have been used and what s/he needs to do. The following three examples demonstrate how a high-level summary is visually presented to a nurse, how individual information is being emphasized, and how different types of information are distinguished and grouped together based on their information properties.

Summarizing Information

Based on our informal user studies, we know that a nurse prefers to see certain information relative to the physical space of the patient's body. Moreover, nurses also prefer to have all the high-level information displayed at the same time so they can survey it quickly. In this summarization display, a 3D model of a human body is used, and information about all devices and drugs is arranged relative to the patient's body.

Emphasizing Information

It is impossible to display all information details at one time. One of our design principles is to display the high-level and important information first, after which the system can continue to elaborate further. For example, if a piece of information could be displayed at different levels of detail, the system would decide to present the qualitative attributes of the information first, and later describe or explain the quantitative aspects of the information. The patient drip display illustrates such a presentation decision. At the beginning, the drip concept is visually represented by a button, which indicates that more information is available. The drip information could then be "popped open" to reveal its lower-level quantitative information, such as a particular drug's name and dosage.

Distinguishing and Grouping Information

To be able to distinguish and group different types of information together is another goal of MedAide. The generated visual presentation should effectively capture such disinctiveness and grouping among different information and communicate it to the intended user. This example of displaying the patient's lab reports illustrates how MedAide meets this design criterion by using visual techniques (e.g., highlighting) to distinguish and group information. The generated lab report display is intended to convey that the patient has an abnormally low hematocrit (Hct) value. To fulfill this communicative intent, the lab item "Hct" is highlighted in red and represented in an italicized font, which is different from the visual encodings of the rest of lab items.

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