In the era of patient-centred care, one of the greatest challenges for healthcare professionals is communication with patients. Distilling years of medical / graduate school education down to a few minutes of explanation is no easy feat. DrawMD ENT is an app aimed at assisting physicians with patient education by providing them with beautifully-illustrated visual aids that can be customised for each patient and procedure.
With the DrawMD ENT app, users have the ability to choose from a generous library of images that can be used as a starting point. Examples include “face and neck”, “tympanic membrane”, “middle ear and ossicles”, “larynx” and “oral cavity”. There is an information icon on each image that reviews what pathologies / procedures can be explained using the selected image. There are also options to use your own photo or work with a blank background.
From there, a number of tools can be selected to further customise the image. For example, the pen tool is useful for freehand sketches while the text tool can be used to add descriptions and pertinent information. These tools can be further modified according to user preference (e.g. colour, line thickness, position).
“Distilling years of medical / graduate school education down to a few minutes of explanation is no easy feat.”
The tool that really makes DrawMD ENT stand out from other apps is called the stamp tool. The stamps are essentially overlay images that can be selected to illustrate various pathologies within ENT, as well as treatments (e.g. PE tubes, septal deviations).
There are optional description fields within the app that can be filled out to provide important information (e.g. practice contact information, procedure description). Fixed fields can be set up through the app settings. Completed images and descriptions can be saved and shared (via e-mail) with a few clicks.
The DrawMD ENT is easily one of the most well-designed and user friendly medical apps I’ve had the pleasure of trying. It is also free to download (iPad only for now; Apple App Store). It comes with an excellent help guide, though you will probably not need to use it very much.
DrawMD ENT is just one of a series of DrawMD apps – various other medical specialties are also available. In 2016, there are plans to combine all of the various apps into a single app, as well as to launch the app for iPhone and Android devices (phones and tablets). Happy drawing!
