Ben Shneiderman interviewed for New York Times digital medical records story

ISR-affiliated Professor Ben Shneiderman (CS/UMIACS) is quoted in a New York Times story about the technical standards issues surrounding the digitization of medical records.

Shneiderman has long had research interests in electronic health records search and visualization. His Lifelines and Lifelines2 projects explore temporal patterns in categorical data with a focus on electronic health records and helping users find potential cause and effects phenomena in databases of patient records.

Shneiderman’s PatternFinder is an integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization for search and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data sets. PatternFinder has been used in the Washington Hospital Center’s AMALGA production system.

He also has developed Similan, a temporal categorical data analysis tool that helps users find similar records from temporal categorical data. By implementing similarity metric computation and adopting ideas from rank-by-feature framework to rank records by similarity, Similan provides an interactive interface to customize and visualize similarity search results.

Published July 19, 2011