Health Chart: A Swiss Compass for Your Personal Healthcare Journey

The Health Chart cross-disciplinary research project helps patients visualize their health journey. Initiated by BFH’s Institute of Patient-Centered Digital Health (PcDH) in collaboration with the Institute of Design Research (IDR) and Aware GmbH, it aims to present health histories in a way that is both medically meaningful and understandable by patients with limited health literacy — improving doctor-patient communication. 

The Doctor Will See You Now…

From back pain to burnout, navigating personal health can rapidly become a daunting task, especially when it competes with other daily duties. Many patients struggle not just because of their symptoms but also because of the complicatedness of their issue, which makes them hard to track, hard to explain, and even harder to prioritise, especially under the stress of the consultation.

“It’s a widespread problem,” says Michaël Laurac, researcher in medical informatics at the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH). “Patients come into appointments with vague symptoms, no structured record, and little sense of what matters most. And yet, the decisions that will be taken during the conversation with their medical professional might define what might or might not happen to them over the next days, weeks or even months for some consultation at the specialist.”

In addition, despite the abundance of health data, many struggle to make sense of it. While tech-savvy individuals track their health effortlessly, less digitally affine and less health literate find managing this information overwhelming.

“When people are exposed to more serious health concerns, they mostly undergo a cold shower of health information they are unprepared for and risk drowning in confusion,” Laurac points out. “Before speaking of prevention programs, what’s missing is a synthesis at a high level to gradually raise the awareness for the population—how to make the most relevant information available, understandable and actionable for shared decisions before complications occur.”

Health Chart aims to bridge this gap by proposing a simple yet powerful idea: create a visual representation of the patient’s health status that can be understood by the patient and used with health professionals. Not a medical report. Not a spreadsheet. A chart—in the literal, navigational sense.

“Think of it like a map,” says Professor Jimmy Schmid, senior researcher in communication design. “If you know where you are, where you’ve been, and what might lie ahead, it becomes easier to make choices.”

Design Meets Informatics: A Golden Union

The project brings together two worlds that complement each other when conceiving software solution: data modelling and communication design.

The medical informatic team focused on identifying and organising relevant health data in a process as experienced from a patient and a professional’s perspective: symptoms, examinations, diagnosis, treatment choice, outcome monitoring. The Communication design team then transformed these abstract structures into a visual representation—without losing nuance or overwhelming users.

Figure 1. Generic healthcare management process

“Designing for health is never just about clarity,” Schmid notes. “It’s also about respect, accessibility, and emotional impact. You’re not designing a weather app—you’re representing someone’s life.”

The Health Chart wireframe is a two-layer interface model. Patients can quickly get an overview of their status, but also dive deeper into symptom histories, working diagnoses, treatment decisions, and outcome measurements.

Figure 1. Conceptual visual representation of the care pathway

What we analysed to support our design decisions?

“We first conducted a literature review and looked at what existed on the market.” says Dr Stephan Gerhard, founder of Aware GmbH. “You would be astonished to realise that most research converge to the same conclusions: a digital visual representation of the patient history would be a valuable tool to support decision-making. Having a visual representation of complex information helps in the communication between the patient and healthcare professionals.”

During the analysis health needs reported by patients are documented as symptoms including severity, onset date, and anatomical location when possible. Additional investigations, such as imaging, laboratory analyses or clinical measurements are recorded with corresponding date. The working diagnosis is the central piece of information, consisting of a name, a code and a measure of probability. Treatments are structured into a care plan, each with defined objectives, a start and end date for each treatment. The outcome of the treatments is communicated during a consultation ensuring patient confirmation that their health needs have been appropriately addressed.

Indeed, the whole process is represented chronologically along a vertical axis, with recent events at the bottom. Symptoms are displayed as vertical lines, while additional investigations appear to the left, positioned according to their date. The working diagnosis sits at the intersection of symptoms and investigations and is recorded at the time of consultation. Treatments are displayed on the right side of the symptoms, with continuous treatments (such as a medication) represented by vertical lines parallel to the symptoms until they conclude.

A carefully designed color-coding and shape system enhances clarity:

• Symptoms (red): Represent their negative impact on quality of life and their emotional burden.
• Investigations (cyan blue): Highlight their objective nature.
• Working diagnosis (purple): Emerges where symptoms and investigations meet, turning light green once the issue is resolved.
• Treatments (light blue): Emphasizing their evidence-based foundation.

Shapes further distinguish elements—symptoms and diagnoses, being closer to the patient’s perception, are represented with rounded shapes, while objective elements like investigations and treatments are square.

What we learned throughout the project?

“One of our main learning is that it is possible to extract a data model from a generic healthcare management process.” explains Michaël Laurac. “Even though each individual pathway is unique to each patient, we could abstract some common process fitting most cases and draw a line about the role of each actor.”

It was then possible to identify the most relevant information exchanged between patients and professionals.

“We never tried to be exhaustive, we instead focus on finding each time a common denominator, that is a model which would fit most situations and which we could progressively refine.”

Building upon the information content which might come to serve as a basis for the communication between patients and professionals, the design team confirmed that a representational model could be drafted and iteratively improve.

What’s Next? A Prototype—and a Conversation

Thanks to funding from BFH’s strategic initiative on Human Digital Transformation, the team has drawn a representation concept. It’s a starting point—enough to spark conversations, workshops, and future development phases.

“As a next step, we would need to test our design hypotheses with patients and professionals to further improve the model including the participatory design methodology. For this we would need to secure additional funding that could facilitate the incorporation of realistic patient data such as symptoms, outcomes of investigations, working diagnosis, and treatments in the representation model” concludes Michaël Laurac.

Health Chart supports the idea that patients can and should be active participants in their own care—if we give them the right interface. So next time you sit in your doctor’s office, wondering if your back pain is “worth mentioning,” imagine having a quiet, clear chart next to you—ready to say: Here’s what’s been going on. Let’s decide together.