French researchers develop symbols for drug info

A new icon system has been developed by researchers in France to enable practitioners to identify drug information using medical symbols.

One use of the new drug icon system is for inclusion in electronic prescribing and medicines management software.

The system uses a graphical language for medical knowledge visualisation called VCM (Visualisation des Connaissances Médicales), aiming to speed up drug information gathering and helping to avoid prescribing errors.

Jean-Baptiste Lamy of the University of Paris, told E-Health Europe: “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, is the design of a graphical language, called VCM. The VCM graphical language was designed using a small number of graphical primitives and combinatory rules.”

The VCM graphical language uses a small set of graphical signs, similar to laundry symbols or road signs, which can be combined to build simple sentences that convey information which is usually displayed in long-paragraphs.

This includes information such as a drug’s side effects or interactions and conditions when it should not be prescribed.

Lamy said: “The resulting system, together with the doctor’s underlying medical training, can be used to help determine the appropriate prescription for the patient.

“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.”

The researchers tested VCM with a group of volunteer general practitioners to assess whether the language is easy to learn and understand and whether it works in practice, and published their results in the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal.

Each practitioner underwent training to learn VCM and was then tested on the meanings of the icons and combinations of icons representing different aspects of a drug monograph.

Results show that physicians read VCM significantly faster than an equivalent text, with fewer errors.

“Diseases, signs, physiological states and life habits, drugs and tests are the medical concepts that can be represented by the VCM graphical language. The results obtained suggest that this objective has been achieved and that this language is highly usable.

“The VCM language may have broader applications. It could be useful for the construction of graphical interfaces facilitating the consultation of other types of medical texts (e.g. clinical guidelines) or patient documents and the data of in the patient’s electronic health record,” Lamy said.

Links

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal paper