Conrad asks:

There are questions. Perhaps the questions have already been asked, though I'm not likely to gain access to the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making article. Questions like, what testing has been done? The iconics seem to be well-conceived, but there are some that would seem to have a lower "visual legibility" than others, because of the level of small detail in those icons. And are there some which are more difficult than others due to cultural interpretations?

Here is the summary from the paper (hoping I am not breaking any copyright rules). One thing that bothered me about the paper as a whole is that they summarise their results in a graph which apparently treats question numbers as a continuous variable — not designed to inspire confidence.

Looking through the icons in the handbook, I agree that they do tend to lack elegance. Some are also unintentionally funny — I recall a spoof article in a Christmas edition of British Medical Journal (I think) in which some of the proposed medical emoticons were strikingly similar to these.

Extract follows:

Background: Many medication errors are encountered in drug prescriptions, which would not occur if practitioners could remember the drug properties. They can refer to drug monographs to find these properties, however drug monographs are long and tedious to read during consultation. We propose a two-step approach for facilitating access to drug monographs. The first step, presented here, is the design of a graphical language, called VCM.

Methods: The VCM graphical language was designed using a small number of graphical primitives and combinatory rules. VCM was evaluated over 11 volunteer general practitioners to assess if the language is easy to learn, to understand and to use. Evaluators were asked to register their VCM training time, to indicate the meaning of VCM icons and sentences, and to answer clinical questions related to randomly generated drug monograph-like documents, supplied in text or VCM format.

Results: VCM can represent the various signs, diseases, physiological states, life habits, drugs and tests described in drug monographs. Grammatical rules make it possible to generate many icons by combining a small number of primitives and reusing simple icons to build more complex ones. Icons can be organized into simple sentences to express drug recommendations. Evaluation showed that VCM was learnt in 2 to 7 hours, that physicians understood 89% of the tested VCM icons, and that they answered correctly to 94% of questions using VCM (versus 88% using text, p = 0.003) and 1.8 times faster (p < 0.001)

Conclusions: VCM can be learnt in a few hours and appears to be easy to read. It can now be used in a second step: the design of graphical interfaces facilitating access to drug monographs. It could also be used for broader applications, including the design of interfaces for consulting other types of medical document or medical data, or, very simply, to enrich medical texts.


-- Regards Jane _______________________________ Jane Teather JET Documentation Services 54A Ferme Park Road London N4 4ED tel: +44 (0) 20 8348 9213 fax: +44 (0) 20 8374 0342 mobile: +44 (0) 7967 366 252 teather <at> compuserve.com Fellow of the Communication Research Institute http://www.communication.org.au

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