Patient History Visualization for Structured Medication Reviews: A Design Study

General practitioners and pharmacists conduct Structured Medication Reviews (SMRs) to optimise prescribing for people with multiple long-term conditions (MLTC), but electronic health record systems often present information in fragmented lists and tabs. We set out to design and validate chart-based visual summaries of patient history data that can support integrated dashboards for SMRs. Using a design-study methodology, we reviewed existing approaches to visualising electronic health records, conducted four mock SMRs, and derived a data abstraction linking clinicians’ questions to patient attributes. Using visual encoding principles, we used 14 candidate chart types and sketched low-fidelity designs. A questionnaire was then used to ask eight clinicians and eleven visualization-literate researchers to rate how effectively each chart communicated its data. Across six combinations of data types, 11 chart types were consistently judged suitable for communicating key information. Finally, we implemented the outcomes of the study in a Python package using 2.1M records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD).