Designing and assessing an interactive sunburst diagram for ICD

Abstract: The international classification of diseases (ICD) is used in healthcare as a health care classification system. The classification provides a system of diagnostic codes for classifying all diseases.The diseases includes nuanced classifications of a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances,and external causes of injury or disease. The current digital systemsfor navigating through medical records are in some areas sub-optimaland could require an extensive revision. When designing a system fornavigating through a database, in this case a set of diagnostic codes, retrieving to familiar layouts such as lists of links could intuitively become the default approach. However, resorting to familiarity, as done with the current configuration of digital ICDnavigation, may leave beneficial perks unexplored. For this thesis,an interactive sunburst diagram for the ICD codes was created toexplore areas in which a more unorthodox navigation model couldpossibly excel - This included measuring ease of use, navigationefficiency measured in time to achieve specified goals and number of clicks accumulated when navigating. The results gave no clear indication that a sunburst diagram used in this domain would bedisadvantageous or inadequate but rather suggested certain benefits.The participants using the Sunburst model for ICD navigationaccumulated less clicks, gave a more accurate estimation of how much time was spent to accomplish navigation tasks and also suggested an improvement of ergonomics.