Visual Analytics in Medical Education: Impacting Analytical Reasoning and Decision Making for Quality Improvement Christos VAITSIS a,1 , Gunnar NILSSON b , Nabil ZARY a a Department of Learning Informatics Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden b Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract. The medical curriculum is the main tool representing the entire undergraduate medical education. Due to its complexity and multilayered structure it is of limited use to teachers in medical education for quality improvement purposes. In this study we evaluated three visualizations of curriculum data from a pilot course, using teachers from an undergraduate medical program and applying visual analytics methods. We found that visual analytics can be used to positively impacting analytical reasoning and decision making in medical education through the realization of variables capable to enhance human perception and cognition on complex curriculum data. The positive results derived from our evaluation of a medical curriculum and in a small scale, signify the need to expand this method to an entire medical curriculum. As our approach sustains low levels of complexity it opens a new promising direction in medical education informatics research. Keywords. Visual analytics, medical education, analytical reasoning, decision making. Introduction Undergraduate medical education is a complex system that constantly needs to be evaluated and transformed to follow the fast pace of changing healthcare. The medical curriculum, as the main instrument in hands of medical teachers for planning, designing and delivering learning and assessment activities towards the learning outcomes is inherently complex and thereby unexploited for analysis and decision support concerning changes and improvements in medical education [1],[2]. In a previous study we reported the limited use of curriculum data for such purposes and we demonstrated how visual analytics (VA) as a new research field can be applied to analyze and visualize a medical curriculum [3]. We also applied VA at the level of competencies and learning outcomes of an undergraduate medical program with possible positive effects on reducing the curriculum’s complexity by creating networks of information representing the curriculum. Previous studies have used VA in higher 1 Corresponding Author: Christos Vaitsis, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Centre for Learning and Knowledge, Karolinska Institutet, Berzelius väg 3, Stockholm, Sweden; christos.vaitsis@ki.se. Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans R. Cornet et al. (Eds.) © 2015 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI). This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-512-8-95 95