Study: Many patients misread medicine labels; visual aids could prevent dosing errors.

A 2006 study found that while 71% of patients with low literacy could repeat dosage instructions, only 35% could correctly count the pills for a day. Medication errors disproportionately affect older adults, who visit emergency rooms for such problems more than twice as often. Research shows that adding pictographs to instructions dramatically improves patient understanding and reduces dosing mistakes. However, creating accurate, language-specific visual aids for all medicines has been a practical barrier. A new tool called Concord uses image models to generate verified pictograms for prescriptions in multiple languages.