Strategic exploration and analysis using interactive visualization of health care databases.

Effective analysis of health care information is a central component in formulating strategies for improvement initiatives. These initiatives involve the analysis of episodes of care, quality measure comparisons, resource utilization, and investigation of temporal relationships between various factors and outcomes. The ability to efficiently recognize the principal patterns and their variations presents special challenges. This paper describes the design issues and application of the Interactive Visual-Exploratory Data Analysis (IV/EDA) system. IV/EDA is a graphical approach to exploratory analysis of health care information designed to rapidly find and communicate relationships essential to formulating and evaluating strategies that address health care improvement.