V-Model: a new perspective for EHR-based phenotyping

BACKGROUND: Narrative resources in electronic health records make clinical phenotyping study difficult to achieve. If a narrative patient history can be represented in a timeline, this would greatly enhance the efficiency of information-based studies. However, current timeline representations have limitations in visualizing narrative events. In this paper, we propose a temporal model named the ‘V-Model’ which visualizes clinical narratives into a timeline. METHODS: We developed the V-Model which models temporal clinical events in v-like graphical structure. It visualizes patient history on a timeline in an intuitive way. For the design, the representation, reasoning, and visualization (readability) aspects were considered. Furthermore, the unique graphical notation helps to find hidden patterns of a specific patient group. For evaluation, we verified our distinctive solutions, and surveyed usability. The experiments were carried out between the V-Model and a conventional timeline model group. Eighty medical students and physicians participated in this evaluation. RESULTS: The V-Model was proven to be superior in representing narrative medical events, provide sufficient information for temporal reasoning, and outperform in readability compared to a conventional timeline model. The usability of the V-Model was assessed as positive. CONCLUSIONS: The V-Model successfully resolves visualization issues of clinical documents, and provides better usability compared to a conventional timeline model. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1472-6947-14-90) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.