A visual analytics approach to understanding care process variation and conformance

With greater pressures of providing high-quality care at lower cost due to a changing financial and policy environment, the ability to understand variations in care delivery and associated outcomes and act upon this understanding is of critical importance. Building on prior work in visualizing healthcare event sequences and in collaboration with our clinical partner, we describe our process in developing a multiple, coordinated visualization system that helps identify and analyze care processes and their conformance to existing care guidelines. We demonstrate our system using data of 5,784 pediatric emergency department visits over a 13-month period for which asthma was the primary diagnosis.