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Abstract
BackgroundClinical practice guidelines are useful for physicians, and guidelines are available on the Internet from various websites such as Vidal Recos. However, these guidelines are long and difficult to read, especially during consultation. Similar difficulties have been encountered with drug summaries of product characteristics. In a previous work, we have proposed an iconic language (called VCM, for Visualization of Concepts in Medicine) for representing patient conditions, treatments and laboratory tests, and we have used these icons to design a user interface that graphically indexes summaries of product characteristics. In the current study, our objective was to design and evaluate an iconic user interface for the consultation of clinical practice guidelines by physicians.MethodsFocus groups of physicians were set up to identify the difficulties encountered when reading guidelines. Icons were integrated into Vidal Recos, taking human factors into account. The resulting interface includes a graphical summary and an iconic indexation of the guideline. The new interface was evaluated. We compared the response times and the number of errors recorded when physicians answered questions about two clinical scenarios using the interactive iconic interface or a textual interface. Users’ perceived usability was evaluated with the System Usability Scale.ResultsThe main difficulties encountered by physicians when reading guidelines were obtaining an overview and finding recommendations for patients corresponding to “particular cases”. We designed a graphical interface for guideline consultation, using icons to identify particular cases and providing a graphical summary of the icons organized by anatomy and etiology. The evaluation showed that physicians gave clinical responses more rapidly with the iconic interface than the textual interface (25.2 seconds versus 45.6, p < 0.05). The physicians appreciated the new interface, and the System Usability Scale score value was 75 (between good and excellent).ConclusionAn interactive iconic interface can provide physicians with an overview of clinical practice guidelines, and can decrease the time required to access the content of such guidelines.
Highlights
Clinical practice guidelines are useful for physicians, and guidelines are available on the Internet from various websites such as Vidal Recos
Results of the performance evaluation There were 40 responses in total; two physicians made errors with the textual interface and no errors were made with the interactive iconic interface
They appreciated the “Mister Visualization of Concepts in Medicine (VCM)” icons for accessing particular cases rapidly and the icons tagging CPG paragraphs that dealt with specific patient conditions
Summary
Clinical practice guidelines are useful for physicians, and guidelines are available on the Internet from various websites such as Vidal Recos. Structured patient data may be unavailable, for example when i) a physician does not enter patient data or enters data as non-computer-interpretable free text, which occurs often [7], ii) data coding is unreliable, a frequent problem [8], or iii) a physician reads a guideline for educational purposes rather than searching for information relating to a given patient. In these situations, access to the full CPG remains necessary
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