Patient-Sharing Network

The anonymized model displays primary care providers (PCPs) in the Austrian province Vorarlberg as circles in randomized positions within each district.

Visual Encoding:

Hovering the mouse pointer over a circle displays a pop-up window with more detailed information on the PCP’s activity.

By clicking a circle, the links to the direct neighbors in the patient-sharing network are displayed.

The SIZE OF A CIRCLE indicates the current activity of a PCP, i.e., the average number of patients per quarter.

The COLOR OF A CIRCLE indicates the current capacity of a PCP on a scale from green (average activity) to red (activity at maximum capacity).

The THICKNESS OF A LINK shows the probability with which a patient would move from one PCP to the next one.

Removing a doctor:

Long-clicking or SHIFT-clicking a circle removes a doctor from the model. His/her patients are newly distributed across the patient-sharing network. The animation draws the links between removed and adjacent doctors.

The circles grow in size according to the increase in patients.

The color of the circle changes on a scale from green to red, indicating how much closer a doctor comes to his/her maximum capacity. If a PCP cannot accept incoming patients anymore, a new wave of distribution is triggered; to distinguish waves of patient referrals from one another, the links of each wave are drawn in a different color.


Click on a circle (doctor) to display the patient-sharing network.
Click again to hide the links.

Long-click or SHIFT-click to remove a doctor.

Doctor positions are randomized within each district.

© D. R. Lo Sardo, S. Thurner, J. Sorger, G. Duftschmid, G. Endel, and P. Klimek - PNAS (2019)