Text With Graphs Improves Medical Decisions
The Research Digest Blog reports on a study that provides important insights into medical decision-making for cognitive designers. The study focused on how text summaries improved (or not) the interpretation of graphical data about a patient’s state in a neonatal intensive care unit (ICU). They found:
‘Overall, these results confirm that in a neonatal ICU, human generated descriptions of time series physiological measures are better able to support medical decision-making than graphs with trend lines,’ the researchers said. ”
The post goes on to talk about the high labor cost associated with generating text summaries and the emergence of new software that can generate summaries automatically.
