More and more hospitals have been switching from paper-based patient records to electronic health records within the last years, which introduced new challenges for healthcare professionals. Each electronic record can hold a vast amount of diverse data, which can easily overwhelm a clinician in the stressful environment of a hospital. Consequently, important information can easily be missed or misinterpreted. These effects are especially critical for medication data, as medication errors can harm the treated patient directly. Proper information visualization is able to address these issues by providing cognitive support to healthcare professionals and facilitating insight into health records. The objectives of this thesis were to design a visualization of patient-specific medication histories and to implement an interactive prototype, which can be used in daily treatment settings. For this purpose, the characteristics and use cases of existing projects addressing
Medicine
The research area "Knowledge-Assisted Visual Analytics" (KAVA) deals with the integration of domain knowledge into Visual Analytics approaches which offers many advantages for research as well as for the analysis of data since analysts do not need to rely on their domain knowledge and can concentrate more on the analysis task itself. Especially in the health care sector, KAVA has great potential which is currently not fully exploited since there are only a few approaches that deal with KAVA in combination with health care data. To fill this gap, we propose a new KAVA approach dealing with a dataset that resulted from a clinical trial of a medication for treating the eye disease Uveitis to provide the possibility of exploring and analyzing the dataset. For designing and developing the approach a user-centered design process, involving a domain expert, in combination with problem-driven visualization research is applied. The final approach is validated using a qualitative task-oriented user study with five visualization experts. The results suggest that the approach is able to support the analysis as well as exploration of the dataset.