HealthTale: A Patient-Centric Health Story Visualization Tool

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Smith, Ryan, Chin, Kyle D., Munzner, Tamara
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Smith, Ryan
Chin, Kyle D.
Munzner, Tamara
author_facet Smith, Ryan
Chin, Kyle D.
Munzner, Tamara
contents Patients often struggle to communicate coherent accounts of their health histories during time-constrained clinical encounters. These accounts, which we refer to as health stories, include both clinical events and lived experiences. Existing systems prioritize structured, clinician-centered data and provide limited support for eliciting and communicating patient-generated narratives. We present HealthTale, a patient-centric visualization system designed to elicit health stories from patients and structure them to facilitate communication during initial clinical conversations. Its design arises from a multi-stage qualitative investigation across domain expert discussions, online narratives (n=20), patient (n=11) and clinician (n=6) interviews, and elicited health stories (n=22), identifying recurring patterns in how individuals construct and communicate their health stories. HealthTale transforms freeform narratives into structured timeline representations, grounded in a data abstraction that models health stories as events that are grouped by health concern and time, capturing both clinical and contextual information, with the flexibility to handle temporally imprecise data and non-linear distributions of events across time. Through evaluation with patients (n=34) and clinicians (n=3), we find that HealthTale supports recall, organization, and self-advocacy, while enabling clinicians to rapidly interpret patient-generated narratives and establish a shared understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HealthTale: A Patient-Centric Health Story Visualization Tool
Smith, Ryan
Chin, Kyle D.
Munzner, Tamara
Human-Computer Interaction
Patients often struggle to communicate coherent accounts of their health histories during time-constrained clinical encounters. These accounts, which we refer to as health stories, include both clinical events and lived experiences. Existing systems prioritize structured, clinician-centered data and provide limited support for eliciting and communicating patient-generated narratives. We present HealthTale, a patient-centric visualization system designed to elicit health stories from patients and structure them to facilitate communication during initial clinical conversations. Its design arises from a multi-stage qualitative investigation across domain expert discussions, online narratives (n=20), patient (n=11) and clinician (n=6) interviews, and elicited health stories (n=22), identifying recurring patterns in how individuals construct and communicate their health stories. HealthTale transforms freeform narratives into structured timeline representations, grounded in a data abstraction that models health stories as events that are grouped by health concern and time, capturing both clinical and contextual information, with the flexibility to handle temporally imprecise data and non-linear distributions of events across time. Through evaluation with patients (n=34) and clinicians (n=3), we find that HealthTale supports recall, organization, and self-advocacy, while enabling clinicians to rapidly interpret patient-generated narratives and establish a shared understanding.
title HealthTale: A Patient-Centric Health Story Visualization Tool
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20207