Tile – map and heat – map as a tool of the digital passport of the pediatric onco-hematology service.

Continuously evolving requirements for the assessment of medical care quality, together with the limited capabilities of traditional reporting formats, create additional challenges for the effective management of specialized care for children with oncological and hematological diseases. In this context, digital solutions that provide not only data collection and indicator calculation but also clear visual representations for health-care managers at different levels are of particular importance. Objective: to assess the feasibility of using tile-maps and heat-maps within the Digital Passport of the pediatric oncology and hematology service as a visual analytics tool for specialized medical care to support managerial decision-making at federal and regional levels. Materials and methods. A dedicated web-based visualizer was implemented, using tile-maps and heat-maps to display quality and resource indicators. The tile-map is built on data from registries, medical information systems and official reporting forms and represents the network of medical organizations providing pediatric oncology and hematology care, the availability of bed capacity and key quality indicators. Heat maps are used to visually display a configurable set of parameters. They are created by adding regulatory rules that split the analyzed quantitative or qualitative criterion into two or more subsets, each with its own color indication, which makes it possible to identify “hot spots” and structural bottlenecks of the service. Results. Within the profile of care, the following tools became available: 1) visual ranking of medical organizations and profiles by key quality and resource indicators; 2) assessment of temporal dynamics of the service through comparison of “heat patterns” across different observation periods; 3) support of patient routing and managerial decisions when individual regions fail to meet mandatory quality criteria established by current regulatory acts. Conclusions. Visual analytics based on tile-maps and heat-maps increases transparency regarding the status of the pediatric oncology and hematology service, facilitates the identification of problem areas and supports evidence-based planning of organizational changes, complementing existing electronic quality assessment systems and regional digital questionnaires.