Visualising Developing Nations Health Records: Opportunities, Challenges and Research Agenda

The benefits of effectively visualizing health records in huge volumes has resulted in health organizations, insurance companies, policy and decision makers, governments and drug manufactures’ transformation in the way research is conducted. This has also played a key role in determining investment of resources. Health records contain highly valuable information; processing these records in large volumes is now possible due to technological advancement which allows for the extraction of highly valuable knowledge that has resulted in breakthroughs in scientific communities. To visualize health records in large volumes, the records need to be stored in electronic forms, properly documented, processed, and analyzed. A good visualization technique is used to present the analyzed information, allowing for effective knowledge extraction which is done in a secured manner protecting the privacy of the patients whose health records were used. As research and technological advancement have improved, the quality of knowledge extracted from health records have also improved; unfortunately, the numerous benefits of visualizing health records have only been felt in developed nations, unlike other sectors where technological advancement in developed nations have had similar impact in developing nations. This paper identifies the characteristics of health records and the challenges involved in processing large volumes of health records. This is to identify possible steps that could be taken for developing nations to benefit from visualizing health records in huge volumes.