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

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.Abstract 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