CONTEXT: THE SHARP-C PROJECT

The University of Maryland is one of the nine institutions participating in the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD) led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. NCCD is funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program. This program seeks to support improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care through advanced information technology. The NCCD award was one of four presented by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to address key barriers to health information technology. NCCD's research focus area is Patient-Centered Cognitive Support.

For more information see:
1) the NCCD website at the University of Texas in Houston (the main PI) OR
2) the Maryland webpage which provides a summary of all the SharpC projects HCIL participated in.

Project Description

Medical treatments carry unique benefits and risks which patients must understand in order to decide which option is best for them. Prior research has demonstrated that patients are ill-equipped to understand the statistical information presented to them through standard decision aids. TreatmentExplorer supports patient eeds by presenting treatment success rate, onset of symptoms, and treatment side effects using a novel graphic representation introduced with staged animation and text-based narration.

Participants

• Lyndsey Franklin, Graduate Student in the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland
• Minhazur Rahman Kazi, University of Maryland
• Catherine Plaisant, Research Scientist, UMIACS, Associate Director of Research at HCIL
• Ben Shneiderman, Professor, Computer Science, Researcher (and Founding Director) at HCIL

Papers

• Description of the interface (and results of an pilot study with student participants)
  Franklin L, Rahman K M, Plaisant C and Shneiderman B, TreatmentExplorer: an Interactive Decision Aid for Medical Risk Communication and Treatment Exploration. to appear in Interacting with Computers (2014)
  Tech report version , or see the Advanced Access version on publisher's website
• Review of the state of the art and new framework
  Franklin L, Plaisant C and Shneiderman B , An Information-Centric Framework for Designing Patient-Centered Medical Decision Aids and Risk Communication,
  Proc. American Medical Informatics Assn (AMIA 2013), 456-465. Tech report version
• Master Thesis
  Franklin L, Designing Interactive Decision Aids for Medical Risk Communication and Exploration of Treatment Options
  Masters Dissertation from the Department of Computer Science

Video

Watch it on YouTube: URL: http://youtu.be/FYl9QWGf76A
or stream/download our mp4 version (193Mb, 1920X1080 resolution, 7:05 min)
or stream/download a smaller mp4 version (67Mb, 1280X720 resolution, 7:05 min)

Demo

Please note that at present the demo works best on Firefox browser only. Also please make sure you are not running Adblock/Adblock plus since these had presented problems with the interface before.

• Demo A [USE FIREFOX - and Reload Page if not working properly] for imaginary Crimson Blot Syndrome (as used in user study)
• Demo B [USE FIREFOX - and relaod as well if needed]: With imaginary data "inspired" by Breast Cancer situation

RELATED PROJECTS

• EventFlow (the inspiration for Treatment Explorer's display)
• The other SHARPC projects (including Twinlist for medication reconciliation)

Sponsorship

This work is supported in part by Grant No. 10510592 for Patient-Centered Cognitive Support under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects Program (SHARP) from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.