Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 35, No. 2, May 2003 99 An Interactive Visual Exploration of Medical Data for Evaluating Health Centres Tiziana Catarci, Giuseppe Santucci and Sonia Fernandes Silva Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Università di Roma “La Sapienza” Via Salaria 113, zipcode 00198 – Roma, Italy [catarci/ santucci]@ dis.uniroma1.it Phone & Fax +39 06 49918331 It is well known that visualisation techniques are suitable for an effective exploration of large data sets. However, not much research has been carried out on applying visualisation techniques in the analysis of medical data apart from image data. Medical information systems collect a vast amount of monitored clinical data coming from specialised machines. The task of accessing and interpreting the portions of data that are relevant to the identification of a specific clinical problem can become a hard task. In order to address this problem, we propose to enhance medical informa- tion systems by providing an interactive visual exploration of large data sets. In this paper, we introduce our approach and show its use in order to enhance the quality and efficiency of health services in haemodialysis centres. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.2[Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User interfaces-graphical user interfaces (GUI); J.3[Life and Medical Sciences]: Medical information systems, health Keywords: Medical information systems, medical data, user interfaces, information visualisation Manuscript received: 28 September 2002 Communicating Editor: Associate Professor Jim Warren Copyright© 2003, Australian Computer Society Inc. General permission to republish, but not for profit, all or part of this material is granted, provided that the JRPIT copyright notice is given and that reference is made to the publication, to its date of issue, and to the fact that reprinting privileges were granted by permission of the Australian Computer Society Inc. 1 . I NTRODUCTI ON Information visualisation and data sharing constitute essential issues at development of medical information systems. In those systems there is the need of accurate storing, rapid access and sharing of a large amount of medical information, such as patient information, clinical symptoms, disease diagnosis and treatments. Concerning the data sharing issue, in (Grimson, Grimson and Hasselring, 2000) it is described that a patient is managed by a team of health care professionals each specialising in one aspect of care. The quality of such shared care critically depends on the ability to share information easily among care providers. Recent mobile technologies (smart cards, telemedicine) are adopted in medical information systems in order to provide data sharing in real-time among different health care organisations. Easy mobility of smart cards (Shelfer and Procaccino, 2002) can be a potential solution for managing patient's medical records, whereas telemedicine connects geographically