Prepare every military clinician to be a visually astute clinician
During four years of medical education the average medical student receives two days of formal dermatology training.  By the completion of a family medicine, pediatrics, emergency medicine or internal medicine residency program they have received at most two weeks. Yet ten to twenty percent of all patient visits to the generalist include a patient with a visually diagnosable problem.

Prepare every student to be a visually astute clinician
The foundation of dermatology and visual medicine lies in the ability of the practitioner to recognize, describe and classify.  Until now medical education has lacked a coordinated methodology for teaching these visual diagnostic skills. 

Better than a book
With the VisualDx system, the student has a standardized and systematic approach to an education in visual medicine and pattern recognition and a window into hundreds of diseases and thousands of images. Unlike an atlas or online image database, each patient’s findings can be entered to build a patient-specific differential diagnosis including common, unusual, terrorist, drug or travel-related disease. 

VisualDx teaches variation and complexity
Atlases and textbooks force students to retrieve information via the name of the condition, and they include only one or two pictures of each disease. VisualDx covers the complexity and variation in presentation between as well as within disease entities, including light vs. dark skin, adults vs. children, immunocompromised vs. immunocompetent and the variation in presentation due to the passage of time.

Teaching bioterrorism and emerging infectious
disease preparedness
Military residents and medical students can't afford to wait for an infectious disease outbreak or terrorist attack to learn what avian flu, SARS or conditions caused by anthrax or vesicant exposure look like as compared to more common conditions. The VisualDx Terrorism Recognition module educates students in conditions caused by potential biologic, radiation and chemical agents, including nearly every Category A, B and C agent as designated by the CDC.

The Acute Pulmonary Infections module helps students clearly understand the differential of emerging infectious diseases and the respiratory effects of chemical warfare and bioterrorism by allowing them to compare a multitude of chest x-rays and CT images with corresponding diagnostic and management summaries.