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According to Shuhan He, an emergency medicine physician who helped develop the anatomical heart and lungs emoji, the medical field needs more emoji. He and others have now made the case for a wider range of health-related emojis, which they believe will help doctors and patients communicate more effectively.

Emojis representing medicine and health, such as stethoscopes, hearing aids, bones, and microorganisms, have just been added to the Unicode Standard. He and his co-authors hope that Unicode will approve more emoji that may be used in medical contexts, such as emoji for other organs, such as the stomach, liver, and intestines, and equipment, such as an IV bag, CT scan, and pill pack, in a commentary published last week in JAMA. He also wants more medical professionals to fight for such emojis and for an emoji standard in medical communication to be established.

“In medicine, we know that when patients speak specific words, they tend to strongly correlate with specific pathology,” He says. Crushing chest pain is frequently described as feeling like an elephant is sitting on one's chest. “We also ask them how they feel about their pain: acute, stabbing, dull, or fiery? “Those are all emoji that can be communicated visually rather than verbally.”

He claims that emoji-like pictures are already commonly utilized in medical settings. To indicate pain levels, the Wong-Baker pain scale uses a cheerful face on one end and a grimacing or sobbing face on the other. The scale was originally designed for children, but it is now used for patients of all ages at many doctors' offices and hospitals. Why not use the visual language that is standardized across people's phones since smiling faces are already a part of medical communication?

Emojis have a variety of applications in medical, according to him. Emoji could be used by patients who can't speak or understand English to convey their problems. A single, standardized visual language could make it easier for patients who speak English but lack health literacy to understand and follow treatment instructions. With the rise of telehealth, medical professionals now have additional opportunities to enhance their conversations with images.

One of He's co-authors, Jennifer 8. Lee is a co-founder of Emojination, a group that fights for more inclusive and representative emoji. Emojination has assisted with the submission of a number of emoji suggestions, including medical emoji such as the stethoscope, blood drop, X-ray, and sticky bandage. (A documentary about emoji creation includes the battle for the blood drop emoji, which was originally offered as a menstruation symbol.)

“The usage of emoji in medicine is particularly interesting, exactly because we're dealing with high stakes in a lot of cases, as well as very strong cultural practices,” Lee says. “In the long run, the more we can progress toward a curated universal visual medium, the better.”

Lee is also a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee's vice-chair. She believes having more major organ emoji would be beneficial, but she believes she is in the minority. Though the brain, anatomical heart, and lungs emojis have all been authorized, she says it's difficult to get other organs into the mix because they're less identifiable and have less demand.

Medical organizations might have a better chance if they created a list of relevant potential emojis and lobbied for their inclusion. “I believe that if the industry as a whole, the professional groups, cared, they could make a difference,” Lee adds.

Though a few other doctors have expressed desires for more relevant emoji, we don’t know yet how much traction He’s proposal will pick up. There’d likely need to be more studies around patient’s perceptions of emoji before medical associations throw their weight behind any formal efforts.

It might not seem like emoji should be a big priority in the medical field, but He thinks anything that improves communication between doctors and patients is worthwhile. Being a doctor “means to listen, to hear their pain and hear their struggle, and to hear exactly what they’re trying to go through, and to help them,” He says. “If we can’t communicate, then we can’t be good doctors. And so this is at the very heart of being a good doctor.”