Understanding variations in pediatric asthma care processes in the emergency department using visual analytics

Area of Science:

• Health services research
• Clinical informatics
• Data visualization

Background:

• Health care delivery involves intricate, multi-boundary processes.
• Human-directed care leads to variability in cost, quality, and outcomes.
• Analyzing and improving these processes is challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and develop an interactive visual analytic tool for exploring health care processes.
• To apply this tool to clinical data for process discovery and analysis.
• To address challenges in systemic care process analysis and improvement.

Main Methods:

• Development of an interactive visual analytic process exploration and discovery tool.
• Application of the tool to analyze clinical data.
• Exploration of data from 5784 pediatric asthma emergency department patients.

Main Results:

• The developed tool facilitated the exploration of complex health care delivery processes.
• Visual analytics enabled deeper insights into clinical data patterns.
• The study demonstrated the utility of the tool in a real-world pediatric asthma cohort.

Conclusions:

• Interactive visual analytics can enhance the understanding of health care delivery processes.
• The tool shows promise for improving care process analysis, conformance testing, and quality improvement.
• Further application of this technology can lead to better patient outcomes in emergency care settings.