Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) Visualization Software Toolkit Overview

This software toolkit allows users to adapt or create new visualizations involving patient-generated health data (PGHD) for both patients and clinicians to support patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS).

May 1, 2024

PGHD – data created or gathered by or from patients/caregivers – provide a holistic picture of the patient for continuous care. However, there is limited guidance on the optimal ways to integrate and visualize PGHD to inform care processes and fit into clinical workflows. The AHRQ CDSiC Innovation Center Core 2 developed a software toolkit called “Charts on FHIR” to enable presentation of selected types of PGHD (e.g., patient-collected, physiologic measurements like blood pressure readings) in support of PC CDS. The core component of the toolkit is an open-source library for creating visualizations of PGHD. The library was used to create two additional components in the toolkit: 1) a demonstration app featuring a dashboard of PGHD shared by a patient that can be used by clinicians to review and interpret PGHD and in shared decision-making scenarios (“clinician app”); and 2) a demonstration app that can be used by patients to contribute PGHD and to visualize their historical data (“patient app”). Both apps integrate with the electronic health record (EHR) system using the Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies (SMART) on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standards.

The software toolkit includes resources and best practices for SMART on FHIR® applications, including:

Resources for building your own app, such as documentation, getting started guides, application programming interface (API) documents, and examples
A repository of projects to modify, including the patient and clinician demonstration apps
Modules and utility scripts for creating synthetic patient-generated data with Synthea
Different FHIR Servers for running the apps
Building the library
Running unit tests
Running a Docker container

The open-source library is linked to AHRQ’s CDS Connect GitHub page and is continuously monitored for contributions. It can be used by developers and innovators to embed visualizations of PGHD in their own apps.

Suggested citation: Elimu Informatics. Charts on FHIR. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. GitHub. https://github.com/AHRQ-CDS/charts-on-fhir.