Rowland Medical Library Spotlights: VisualDx
By: Dr. Sarah Adcock
VisualDx is a clinical decision support resource best known for clinical images, clinical photography, evidence summaries, differential diagnosis tools, and patient education. Faculty, students, and residents can build custom differentials by entering patient symptoms, signs, and other details. VisualDx is particularly useful for identifying skin conditions, infectious diseases, drug reactions, and other visually recognizable problems.
Students may especially appreciate that the extensive image library allows for side-by-side comparisons and the guided workup feature simplifies tricky cases. Teaching faculty can integrate VisualDx’s high-quality images in lectures or embed them in Canvas to support student learning. The “What’s the Diagnosis?” feature provides a weekly challenge to increase visual diagnosis skills.
VisualDx can be accessed anywhere via desktop or mobile platforms. The recently added single sign-on feature allows users to create a personal account using their UMMC email credentials.
- Search Options: Search by condition, symptom, or visual clues
- Content: Contains over 46,000 images plus evidence summaries
- Scope: Covers over 3,000 pediatric and adult conditions in dermatology, emergency medicine, internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, ophthalmology, dentistry, and more
- Special Features: Differential diagnosis tool, CME credit, mobile app
VisualDx is available to UMMC affiliates on or off-campus. Find it using the A - Z Databases list on the Rowland Medical Library website.
