BRIGE: Quantitative Model-Based Visualizations of Complex Health Care Processes

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This Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) grant provides funding to design and evaluate visualizations that will allow health care decision makers, including policy makers and hospital administrators, to understand how health care workers and patients complete health care processes. Decision makers will be able to use the visualizations to make better choices about how to improve the health care processes, thereby increasing process efficiency and reducing process-related medical errors. The researcher will design visualizations using existing process data from two studies. In the first study, researchers used eye-tracking technology to document how health care workers verified a patient's identity, with and without barcoding technology. In the second study, researchers observed the surgery process, wherein some surgeons were sleep deprived. The researcher will evaluate decision makers' attention allocation, interpretation of information, and use of information when making process improvement choices based on 1) summary statistics and charts, 2) complex numerical information, and 3) varying forms of the visualizations.If successful, the results of this research will improve health care decision makers' abilities to redesign health care processes. By fine-tuning the design of the process visualizations, they will be able to analyze and improve more health care processes in less time. By empirically evaluating how they use the visualizations, the research will ensure that the visualizations are easy to understand and useful to the decision makers. This approach is scalable and lends itself to visualizing processes in non-health care domains.