Ryan Smith, Kyle D. Chin, Tamara Munzner
Patients often struggle to communicate coherent accounts of their health histories during time-constrained clinical encounters. These accounts, which we refer to as health stories, include both clinical events and lived experiences. Existing systems prioritize structured, clinician-centered data and provide limited support for eliciting and communicating patient-generated narratives. We present HealthTale, a patient-centric visualization system designed to elicit health stories from patients and structure them to facilitate communication during initial clinical conversations. Its design arises from a multi-stage qualitative investigation across domain expert discussions, online narratives (n=20), patient (n=11) and clinician (n=6) interviews, and elicited health stories (n=22), identifying recurring patterns in how individuals construct and communicate their health stories. HealthTale transforms freeform narratives into structured timeline representations, grounded in a data abstraction that models health stories as events that are grouped by health concern and time, capturing both clinical and contextual information, with the flexibility to handle temporally imprecise data and non-linear distributions of events across time. Through evaluation with patients (n=34) and clinicians (n=3), we find that HealthTale supports recall, organization, and self-advocacy, while enabling clinicians to rapidly interpret patient-generated narratives and establish a shared understanding.