A Study of Healthcare Team Communication Networks using Visual Analytics

Proc 2023 7th Int Conf Med Health Inform ICMHI 2023 (2023). 2023 May:2023:104-111. doi: 10.1145/3608298.3608319. Epub 2023 Oct 18.

Abstract

Cooperation among teams or individuals of healthcare professionals (HCPs) is one of the crucial factors towards patients' survival outcome. However, it is challenging to uncover and understand such factors in the complex Multiteam System (MTS) communication networks representing daily HCP cooperation. In this paper, we present a study on MTS communication networks constructed with real-world cancer patients' Electronic Health Record (EHR) access logs. We adopt a visual analytics workflow to extract associations between semantic characteristics of MTS communication networks and the patients' survival outcomes. The workflow consists of a neural network learning phase to classify the data based on the chosen input and output attributes, a dimensionality reduction and optimization phase to produce a simplified set of results for examination, and finally an interpreting phase conducted by the user through an interactive visualization interface. We provide the insights found using this workflow with two case studies and an expert interview.

Keywords: Electronic Health Records; Healthcare; Interpretability; Machine Learning; Networks; Visual Analytics.