Transforming Medical Cucumbers into Sunbeams

Abstract

A recent report from Johns Hopkins University estimated that more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die annually from medical errors. There are surely many contributing causes for this horrendous statistic, but one of them, we conjecture, is faulty communication between medical caregivers when a patient is passed between them. In this essay we suggest that replacing the often complex tables of patient information into a more comprehensible graphic format can reduce errors of information and make clerical errors easier to pick out. We illustrate this with both a contemporary data set and a famous historical one drawn from the 18th century.