HealthTale: A Patient-Centric Health Story Visualization Tool
Authors
Ryan Smith (University of British Columbia), Kyle D Chin (University of British Columbia), Tamara Munzner (University of British Columbia)
Presentation
- Session
- Can we have a (real) doctor, please?
- Time
- Tuesday, Nov 10, 13:12 – 13:24 (US/Eastern) · session 13:00 – 14:30
- Location
- Hall America north
Links
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Keywords
Healthcare Visualization, Narrative Visualization, Patient-Generated Data, Patient–Clinician Communication, Temporal Visualization, Data Abstraction.
Abstract
Patients often struggle to communicate coherent accounts of their health histories during time-constrained clinical encounters. These accounts, which we refer to as health stories, include both clinical events and lived experiences. Existing systems prioritize structured, clinician-centered data and provide limited support for eliciting and communicating patient-generated narratives. We present HealthTale, a patient-centric visualization system designed to elicit health stories from patients and structure them to facilitate communication during initial clinical conversations. Its design arises from a multi-stage qualitative investigation across domain expert discussions (n=3), online narratives (n=20), patient (n=11) and clinician (n=6) interviews, and elicited health stories (n=22), identifying recurring patterns in how individuals construct and communicate their health stories. HealthTale transforms freeform narratives into structured timeline representations, grounded in a data abstraction that models health stories as events grouped by health concern and time. The abstraction captures both clinical and contextual information while accommodating temporally imprecise data and non-linear distributions of events across time. Through evaluation with patients (n=34) and clinicians (n=3), we find that HealthTale supports recall, organization, and self-advocacy, while enabling clinicians to rapidly interpret patient-generated narratives and establish a shared understanding.
For Practitioners
Healthcare visualization practitioners, clinical informaticians, digital health designers, and developers of patient-facing health technologies may be interested in this paper. The findings show how patient-authored health stories can be structured and visualized without removing the personal, contextual, and non-medical information that patients consider important. Practitioners can apply the proposed data abstraction and design considerations when developing intake tools, patient portals, health-history summaries, or other systems that help patients prepare for clinical encounters. The paper also illustrates how visual summaries can support reflection and organization for patients while providing clinicians with an efficient overview and information scent for follow-up questions. More broadly, practitioners can use these findings to design health-information systems that complement clinical records by preserving the patient’s perspective and supporting communication between patients and clinicians.