Medical Road Signs

A system of visual icons could cut down on doctors' mistakes

By Jessica Cheng Posted 04.25.2008 at 11:41 am 2 Comments

Medical Icons Clear as a bell? Lamy et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Road signs have been a blessing to many drivers, acting as a quick guide away from danger or to the nearest gas stations. Now researchers in France have come up with an iconic language of their own to help lead doctors to the right drug prescription. Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his colleagues at the University of Paris hope the VCM (Visulaisation des Connaissances Médicales) icon system will help lessen prescribing errors. Something often traced to restraints on physicians' time and resources that prevent them from easily looking up or remembering drug properties. With VCM, doctors can see the risks associated with any given drug at a glance.

Sentence: Lamy et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

The icons can even be put into groups to graphically represent complex sentences such as “Risk of hepatic problems, requiring hepatic monitoring; if an hepatic problem occurs, stop the treatment.” [Left]

The eleven physicians who tested the system as part of a study published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, learned VCM in a matter of hours. Once they had it down, doctors understood VCM questions almost twice as fast and several percentage points more accurately than text.

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2 Comments

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ford2go

04/26/08 at 2:56 am

This may not be such a great idea. Icons are not 'obvious'. They can be great , but only if they're undestandable -- and if they're big enough to see.

In the case of drug interactions, I'm thinking that there are a lot of comditions to describe. This would require a lot of icons, which would probably defeat the purpose. The docs would have to learn a new pictorial language. Also, if the differentiation among the various symbols isn't clear, there could easily be more confusion.

It might actually be better to have a few icons that point to the some general conditions. Then physicians might be able to decide if a particular patient was 'at risk', and do more research.

This may be one of those concepts that sounds good, but doesn't really work out in practice.

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