A typology of data concepts and contexts in clinician-patient communication

This paper presents a typology of concepts and contexts to inform the design of medical data visualizations for clinician-patient communication. As the accessibility, ubiquity and complexity of personal medical data grows, so does the need for patients to understand and interpret it correctly. Based on interviews with 19 healthcare professionals and analysis of current patient communication materials, our typology captures i) the diverse types of medical data communicated; ii) the features clinicians need patients to recognise and understand about these data; iii) contextual information required; iv) motivation for communicating data to patients; and v) current common visualization techniques. In doing so it identifies and defines the key dimensions of data-communication scenarios relevant to data visualizers working with patient data. We apply the typology to classify real world clinical scenarios and through doing so, illustrate how the typology can inform data visualization when designing communication aids for clinicians.