What clinicians care about
- Average over a given time period: clinicians want to immediately see what the patient's average blood pressure has been, over a certain time period.
- Highest and lowest systolic and diastolic over a time period: it is also helpful for clinicians to see what the 'range' has been over a specific time period - both for systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
- Clinicians are also thinking: how do the above numbers compare to the patient's goal?
Graphing considerations
- Consider making the patient's goal very clear on the graph; usually the upper limit of the goal is most important
- Systolic and diastolic usually appear as two overlaid plotted line graphs
- Heart rate is sometimes useful, but many clinicians have told us they don't need to see it. Consider making it an optional component of the graph.
- While interacting with the graph to get detailed readings, consider allowing the user to view blood pressure as one number (e.g. 145/72) instead of forcing them to look in two locations to mentally put together the reading ("let's see, systolic was 145 and...diastolic was 72.")
- Use colors and weights to help indicate where there is and is not data on the graph
Source Code
To experiment with the code that rendered this graph, check out this
JSFiddle
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