Throughout the process of medical care, data points amass. During a visit, interactions are coded and categorized, and observations are noted. A data profile continues to develop after a visit, as these encounters are translated to claims. This growing mass of data serves as the primary point of continuity for a patient’s medical history, in which the electronic health record becomes the narrative of the patient’s health care experience.
For the complex patient, this narrative is fragmented — bits and pieces are stored in different sources. What the primary provider sees might not match up with a secondary source, or may leave out a key piece of medical history on the patient.
This work abstracts the patient data profile, illustrating its richness and source distribution with hues and fills. The artist focuses on an average patient in one sample practice in major metropolitan city. This playful representation of the morass of health data stored in multiple disparate data sources, invites the viewer to ponder how these data points are pieced together to form a cohesive patient story. In the second set of figures, the artist explores how without integration of multiple data sources, the provider would be left with fragmented insight into the patient’s medical history.
SQL, D3.js SVG, with Illustrator
Data sourced from Arcadia Benchmark Database with multiple EHR and Claims datasets