EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.
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flows," said John Cox, president, CEO, and co-founder of Visible Health, which now produces the app. The app, which is free and for the iPad, can be found at the App Store. "[With the app], it's very easy to create a customized explanation for your patients," Mr. Cox said. "It's about efficiency and creating a personalized experience for the patient and about making the patient feel confident about the surgeon, about the procedure, and about his or her decision-making." About the app The company behind drawMD, Visible Health (Austin, Texas), was founded by two physicians and Mr. Cox in 2012 to expand the company's reach beyond urology and use technology to "help improve the collaboration between clinicians and their patients." The drawing app was designed to make the process of a physician explaining a medical procedure to a patient more technologically advanced than pen and paper. "Historically, a lot of physicians, when getting ready to explain a procedure, will grab the exam table paper, pull it out, and draw out rough sketches—'Here's the anatomy, here's the malignancy, and we come along with the device here and remove this,'" Mr. Cox said. "Visual paradigms tend to help in explaining medical issues. That was the original impetus." Each app, including the new ophthalmic version, is created with the assistance of practicing physicians in that specialty. Physicians determine the top 80% of procedures that typically lead to patient consultations in their specialty. They explain the artwork needed to illustrate those procedures to artists, who then create professional medical artwork for the app. How it works The app is simple to use, Mr. Cox said. "You pick from a handful of templates that are basically different anatomic views. You open that up and on each of the templates, you can customize it by drawing with your finger," he said. "You can add text and annotations to it or you can add 'stamps,' which are variations. For example, you might have a close-up of the eye, and you might add a stamp that's a cataract or you might add a stamp that represents a LASIK procedure that alters the image behind it, and you can resize and move everything around." Other images can be uploaded to the app and used as starting points for drawings. The drawing can be created in front of patients in the exam room, so that patients can discuss the procedure or disease displayed in more detail with physicians in real time as they draw it on the iPad. When the physician is finished, patients can take the image home as a printout or receive it in an email. "Then the patient has an artifact," Mr. Cox said. Feedback Visible Health is always looking for feedback about the app, Mr. Cox said, and he encourages physicians to offer their thoughts on everything from images to features. "The basic philosophy behind the app is [it's] not intended necessarily to be exhaustive," he said. "We want to put an application out there that's got a lot of medical artwork in it that supports most of the conversation, but we want our users to help us drive and improve that content." By registering within the app, ophthalmologists can provide that feedback, and will have access to additional customized "premium features" when they are released. Those include the ability to add other resources such as documents, videos, and animations. Another feature will be a secure portal that allows exchange of information with patients without the use of physicians' email addresses. This way, physicians will never need to use a personal or work email account with patients when sending information. "We're really excited about this app," Mr. Cox said. "We're really excited about serving the ophthalmology community." OB Editors' note: Mr. Cox is president, CEO, and co-founder of Visible Health. Contact information Cox: support@drawmd.com December 2013 • Ophthalmology Business 11