Why Visualize Data? – Intro

We are locked into 20th century, paper-based data accounting practices

As clinicians it’s difficult to remember the details of every clinical encounter. Few of us possess the ability to recall a detailed history of our clinical actions in a way that allows us to inspect them for signs of clinical change. Typically, we integrate our current clinical experience into the history of experiences with the client. Paper and other text-based techniques may provide us a behavioral record, but they are ill-suited for analyzing clinical performance and clinical change. We need to see a client’s performance in a way that play to our visual pattern recognition strengths while eliminating our attention, memory and computation limitations.

Unfortunately most available graphic solutions require too much time and effort to make them useful for clinical practice.