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Conrad asks:<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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?</pre>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Extract follows:<br>
<br>
<hr size="2" width="100%"><font color="#3333ff"><b>Background:</b> 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.<br>
<br>
<b>Methods:</b> 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.<br>
<br>
<b>Results:</b> 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)<br>
<br>
<b>Conclusions:</b> 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.</font><br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Regards
Jane
_______________________________
Jane Teather
JET Documentation Services
54A Ferme Park Road
London
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tel: +44 (0) 20 8348 9213
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mobile: +44 (0) 7967 366 252
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:teather@compuserve.com">teather@compuserve.com</a>
Fellow of the Communication Research Institute
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.communication.org.au">http://www.communication.org.au</a></pre>
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