According to a recent study published in 'JMIR mHealth and uHealth', the electronic Pain drawings (PDs) can help improve doctors' understanding of patients suffering from acute pain in a clinical setting. Past few years have witnessed a shift toward the tablet-based acquisition of PDs, and various studies have been performed to test the reliability, usefulness and repeatability of electronic PDs.

But, as per Nour Shaballout et al. no study has examined the potential role of electronic PDs in clinical assessment and treatment of inpatients in acute pain situations. Nour Shaballout and researchers assessed whether knowledge of the patients' electronic PD has the potential to enhance the doctors' understanding of their patients and to affect their clinical decision making. Also, these researchers aimed to recognise the differences between electronic PDs of patients and their treating pain specialists in an acute pain situation and find those particular characteristics derived from the PDs that had a huge impact on the doctors' understanding.  The electronic PDs from 47 inpatients in acute pain situations were obtained before their consultation with a pain specialist on a tablet personal computer with the help of a stylus. These specialists drew their proposition of the patients' pain following anamnesis and physical examination before looking at their patients' drawings. These patients' drawings were then revealed to the doctors. They were asked to analyse how much the additional information improved their understanding of the case and how much it affected their clinical decision on an 11-point Likert scale (0='not at all' and 10='very much'). The similarities and differences of patients' and doctors' PDs were investigated via visual inspection and by calculating the Jaccard index and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of the pain area and number of the pain clusters. The exploratory analyses were performed using correlation tables to recognise particular factors that influenced doctors' understanding. It was found that the patients' PDs significantly improved the doctors' understanding and to a lesser extent their clinical decision. Electronic PDs of patients and doctors depicted fair to good similarity for pain extent and widespreadness being the crucial factors in helping doctors to understand their patients. The researchers concluded, "the ability of electronic PDs to visualize differences between doctors' and patients' conception of pain can improve the doctor-patient communication."