Healthcare infographics — explaining care without the jargon

One sheet that gets a piece of health information to somebody who is anxious, rushed, or reading in a corridor — patient guidance, a care pathway, public-health figures, or a practice reporting its own waiting times. The distinguishing feature is that the reader has to act on it afterwards, so it is judged on whether they did the right thing next, not on whether it looked good.

No, and this is the most important thing on the page. What it does is composition: it reads the text or the figures you give it, decides what kind of shape they want, and lays them out with a chart chosen to match. It has no clinical knowledge, no access to guidelines, and no way of telling a correct dose from a plausible-looking one. If you ask it to supply the facts rather than arrange yours, it will produce something that reads convincingly and may be wrong. Bring your own source — the guideline, the leaflet, the dataset — and have someone qualified check the finished sheet before it goes on a wall or into anyone’s hands. That is true of every AI tool being marketed for this, including the ones selling ready-made clinical prompts, and it is worth saying plainly.

No, and please do not. There is no BAA, no HIPAA or GDPR programme, and nothing here is built for protected health information — we would rather say that than let it be assumed. The specifics, so you can judge for yourself: an uploaded file is held in memory and read for its text rather than stored as a file, but that text is then sent to a third-party model provider to be composed, and the sheet it produces is saved to your account with a link that opens without a sign-in. Use de-identified, aggregate or already-public data — practice-level figures, guideline content, published statistics — and keep anything identifiable out of it.

Start from the source document, not from a layout. Decide the single thing the reader must do differently, then paste the relevant passage or upload the leaflet, guideline or spreadsheet — PDF, Word, CSV or Excel, up to 25MB — and a first draft comes back composed, with the figures already placed. Then do the three things that matter more than the design: check every number against the source, put the source and the review date on the sheet itself, and read it aloud to somebody who does not work in health. If they cannot tell you what to do next, the sheet is not finished.

The honest version is narrower than the usual answer. A sheet helps when the information is a sequence, a comparison or a quantity — when to take something, which of two things this is, how likely an outcome is — because those are hard to hold in memory from speech alone, especially by someone who has just been given bad news. It does not help when it replaces a conversation, and it actively hurts when it compresses a decision that genuinely has trade-offs into a single reassuring number. Treat it as something a person leaves with, not as the explanation itself.

Some of the advice circulating on this is not sound. Several pages on patient teaching build their case on identifying a patient’s learning style and matching materials to it; that idea has not held up when tested and it is not a good basis for designing anything. What health-literacy guidance does consistently recommend is duller and more effective: plain words instead of clinical terms, one instruction at a time, absolute numbers rather than relative risk, and asking the person to say back what they are going to do — the teach-back check — which is the only reliable way to find out whether the sheet worked. Design the sheet so that teach-back is easy to pass.

The ones that pay off are where a patient has to remember a sequence or make a comparison: how to take a course of antibiotics, what happens at a first appointment, the difference between two conditions that get confused, red-flag symptoms and who to ring, an immunisation schedule, recovery expectations after a procedure. Practices also get a lot from publishing their own numbers — waiting times, appointment mix, uptake — because that is information nobody else has. For general public-health material, it is worth checking first whether the CDC, the WHO or your national health service has already published something on the topic: their versions are reviewed, free to use under their own terms, and carry an authority a clinic-made sheet does not.

Not verifiably, and on this page in particular that gap is worth stating rather than glossing. There is no contrast checker here, no alt-text field, and no accessibility audit of the output — nothing measures or certifies anything, so no compliance claim can be made about what comes out. What you get is a sheet with large type and real, selectable text rather than words baked into a picture, which is a genuine advantage over an AI-generated image and is not the same as being accessible. If you are producing material under an accessible-information standard, plan on checking contrast and adding alternative text yourself, and treat this as a drafting tool rather than a compliant one.

Not as an editable .pptx — there is no PowerPoint export here. A sheet goes onto a slide as a PNG, which for teaching or a departmental update is generally fine, and choosing the wide shape before it composes gets you 16:9 with nothing cropped. If you specifically want editable slide objects, Slidesgo and the other Google Slides libraries are built for that and will serve you better.

Yes, and A3 is the size most noticeboards take. The poster page has the resolution arithmetic for each paper size and is honest about where the ceiling is; the two things to know first are that the best-quality download is a paid feature and that there is no vector export, so proof one at A4 before printing a set. Put the review date on it, because an undated sheet on a waiting-room wall is still there three guideline revisions later.

Yes. The free plan needs no card and is exactly one infographic — enough to run one leaflet or one month of figures through it and judge whether the output is worth anything to you. The download is standard quality and a small badge sits in the footer, which is worth knowing if the sheet is going out under a practice’s name. Paid plans go from about 80 pieces a month upward and add brand kits, editing by asking, best-quality downloads and removal of the badge.