Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
health stories
patient narratives
clinical communication
patient-centered visualization
health history
HealthTale: A Patient-Centric Health Story Visualization Tool
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenge that patients often struggle to articulate coherent health narratives integrating clinical events and personal experiences during clinical consultations, while existing systems predominantly prioritize physician-oriented structured data and overlook patient-generated narratives. To bridge this gap, the authors propose the first abstraction model specifically designed for patient-centered health storytelling. Through a multi-stage qualitative investigation—including expert discussions, online narrative analysis, and clinician–patient interviews—they identify core patterns of narrative construction and implement an interactive, timeline-based visualization system. This system enables patients to transform unstructured, nonlinear accounts into structured representations organized by health issues and temporal progression, preserving both clinical and contextual information while accommodating temporal ambiguity. Evaluation demonstrates that the system enhances patients’ ability to recall, organize, and advocate for their health concerns, while also facilitating clinicians’ rapid comprehension and fostering shared understanding.
📝 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, 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 that are grouped by health concern and time, capturing both clinical and contextual information, with the flexibility to handle 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
patient-centered visualization
health storytelling
structured timeline
narrative abstraction
clinical communication
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