VCM was successfully implemented in DC as an option. It increased the success rate of information retrieval tasks, despite requiring slightly more time, and was well accepted by end-users.

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.

Data entry by physicians is a critical aspect in the health care domain, in which errors may lead to severe consequences for patients. This paper describes and discusses these aspects to support human-centered design of appropriate human-computer interaction technology. The following issues will be addressed, including system aim, users' profiles, interaction devices and environment of use, to cite the most important. Our work is based on a literature survey, questionnaires, and an active participatory design process conducted with healthcare professionals. Since the crucial factor is context of use, we elicited several relevant contextual attributes that enabled us to create and incrementally upgrade a context model. This conceptual model is intended to support a scenario-based design approach of future data entry systems. A few scenarios are provided.