Modeling an Information Visualization Engine for Situational-Awareness in Health Insurance

Abstract

Nowadays private health insurance is experiencing a substantial transformation. The number of chronic patients has increased greatly because of unhealthy behaviors, chronic medical conditions are responsible for two-thirds of current healthcare cost’s increase. Health insurance players face new challenges on how to prevent disease burdens and how to act preventively by promoting healthy behaviors to improve quality of life and wellbeing. Promoting a collaborative dataflow to keep all actors aware about events requiring their immediate attention assumes therefore a key relevance to enable an active participation of healthcare professionals in monitoring patient’s healthy behaviors. The implementation of self-awareness mechanisms addresses the responsibility of the patients for their actions. Following a user-centric approach and service design thinking principles, this paper presents an information visualization model for situational-awareness that streamlines visual representation of events in a collaborative decision making environment, as a way to proactively monitor unhealthy risk behaviors and risk situations within the health insurance domain. This work presents the outcomes of a prototype that describes two operational scenarios, demonstrating how the proposed model can be applied to health insurance.