Scope and Impact of Visualization in Training Professionals in Academic Medicine

Abstract

Professional training often requires need-based scheduling and observation-based assessment. In this paper, we present a visualization platform for managing such training data in a medical education domain, where the learners are resident physicians and the educators are certified doctors. The system was developed through four focus groups with the residents and their educators over six major development iterations. We present how the professionals involved, nature of training, choice of the display devices, and the overall assessment process influenced the design of the visualizations. The final system was deployed as a web tool for the department of emergency medicine, and evaluated by both the residents and their educators in an uncontrolled longitudinal study. Our analysis of four months of user logs revealed interesting usage patterns consistent with real-life training events and showed an improvement in several key learning metrics when compared to historical values during the same study period. The users’ feedback showed that both educators and residents found our system to be helpful in real-life decision making. *e-mail: venkat.bandi@usask.ca †e-mail: d.mondal@usask.ca ‡e-mail: brent.thoma@usask.ca