title: Towards iconic language for patient records, drug monographs, guidelines and medical search engines.
abstract: Practicing physicians have limited time for consulting medical knowledge and records. We have previously shown that using icons instead of text to present drug monographs may allow contraindications and adverse effects to be identified more rapidly and more accurately. These findings were based on the use of an iconic language designed for drug knowledge, providing icons for many medical concepts, including diseases, antecedents, drug classes and tests. In this paper, we describe a new project aimed at extending this iconic language, and exploring the possible applications of these icons in medicine. Based on evaluators' comments, focus groups of physicians and opinions of academic, industrial and associative partners, we propose iconic applications related to patient records, for example summarizing patient conditions, searching for specific clinical documents and helping to code structured data. Other applications involve the presentation of clinical practice guidelines and improving the interface of medical search engines. These new applications could use the same iconic language that was designed for drug knowledge, with a few additional items that respect the logic of the language.
authors.affiliation: LIM&BIO (Laboratoire d'Informatique Médicale et Bioinformatique), UFR SMBH, University Paris 13, Bobigny, France. jibalamy@free.fr
authors.forename: Jean-Baptiste
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Lamy
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Duclos
authors.forename: Saliha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hamek
authors.forename: Marie-Catherine
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Beuscart-Zéphir
authors.forename: Gaetan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kerdelhué
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Darmoni
authors.forename: Madeleine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Favre
authors.forename: Hector
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Falcoff
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pereira
authors.forename: Elisabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Serrot
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Mitouard
authors.forename: Etienne
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Hardouin
authors.forename: Yannick
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kergosien
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Venot
mesh_terms: D003196:Computer Graphics; D004346:Drug Information Services; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D005602:France; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D057386:Search Engine / Q000379:methods*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface