DrawMD Pediatrics is a great app for communicating with kids and their parents

Pediatricians are long used to using visual aids to help patients and parents understand medical conditions. Used with audiences on multiple developmental levels, those drawings can range from very rudimentary ones for children to more sophisticated ones for adolescents and parents. DrawMD Pediatrics is an easy-to-use app that gives providers the ability to use more sophisticated and customizable visual aids in helping patients and parents understand and take more ownership in their healthcare choices. A review of the DrawMD cardiology app can be found here.

The app is very simple to use. The app opens to the home screen where users can choose to start a new drawing or use one of their saved drawings. Once users register (which is free and easy to do through the app) they can download seven pre-populated images, use a blank canvas to draw an image themselves, or use a photo (which also opens the camera to take a photo).

For each pre-populated image there are “stamps” which are specific condition overlays. For example, the mouth/oral cavity image includes stamps that illustrate different types of pharyngitis. The stamps can be resized or the images annotated with lines or arrows.

The app also permits adding text to the images as well as descriptive information.

Using your own photos enables all stamps to be chosen although users cannot easily search through them.

The annotation options also include self-explanatory “undo” and “clear all” options and a “layers” option that permits users to edit different layers of images and change the background without changing the entire image.

Images can be emailed, with the image directly embedded and also (if the option is chosen) attached as a PDF.

They can also be saved locally into the app’s “saved drawing” section or into the cloud, but only through “VisualHealth Connect” and not through any other cloud-based storage such as DropBox or Box. Images can also be printed through AirPrint.

The app also includes a “community” section where users can post questions for other users and request images, and an information tab which includes a user’s guide.

The seven pre-populated images do cover 45 conditions that primary care and general pediatricians face, and cover 22 procedures as well.

However, they are a bit limiting. There are no cardiac images, for example, limiting its utility for explaining congential cardiac disease. The “Pediatric Urology” section does not include female urogenital anatomy and the Mouth/Middle Ear sections do not leave any options for sinusitis or allergic rhinitis. Of course, not every condition can be covered but it is a bit frustrating that DrawMD has these images and associated stamps in their other condition specific apps (such as DrawMD OB/GYN or DrawMD ENT). You have to save images to your cloud account and then download the app to use other DrawMD images instead of being able to download them centrally on this app.

Also, of note, unlike many other DrawMD apps the Pediatrics version is not yet sponsored by any medical device or pharmaceutical companies but may be in the future.

Lastly, the app’s avatars are all Caucasian boys without an ability to choose other avatars that may better match the gender or ethnicity of patients.