Journal of Contemporary Medical Education
Educational Technologies
www.scopemed.org DOI: 10.5455/jcme.20140818063145
Enhancing productivity and learning using mobile “Apps” for medical students Anthony Vo, Ambika Gupta Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Address for Correspondence: Anthony Vo, 18 Jenscott Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2C 4E3. E-mail: Anthony.
[email protected] Received: April 04, 2014 Accepted: August 18, 2014 Published: October 12, 2014
ABSTRACT Mobile devices and apps are commonly used among medical students. Taking advantage of apps can help students enhance their productivity and learning, whereas in medical school. This article represents the authors’ opinions of how mobile apps can help medical students, along with practical app suggestions.
KEY WORDS: Apps, education, medical, mobile
INTRODUCTION Mobile applications, or simply known as “apps,” are programs that are downloaded onto mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. These apps can be used to enhance productivity and learning. In medical school, 92.6% of students own a mobile device and the majority of them use apps to find drug information, perform clinical calculations, and take notes [1]. However, with nearly 1,200,000 apps in the Apple App Store alone, it can be challenging for students to know, which apps will be practical during their training [2]. This article represents the authors’ opinions of how mobile apps can help medical students enhance productivity and learning, along with practical app suggestions. All suggested apps have no purchasing costs associated with them.
login credentials without having the student utilize a web browser to access different logins or journal portals.
MOBILE ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS Recommended: Dropbox [Figure 2] - Available on iOS/Android/ BlackBerry OS/Kindle Fire Alternatives: Google Drive, iCloud
Recommended: Docphin [Figure 1] - Available on iOS/Android
With nearly 82% of tablet and 58% of smart phone consumers using their devices for academic purposes in higher education [3], the need to access resources on mobile devices is important. Several mobile apps have been designed to allow students to access documents using an online virtual storage device. Students can use the app to view, save and sync documents to their computers, without the need of physical storage device. These apps can also support multiple students, allowing files to be shared and disseminated. The virtual storage also mitigates any possibility of losing or misplacing a storage device.
Alternatives: Read by QxMD
MEDICAL REFERENCES
One of the most difficult responsibilities as a trainee is staying up to date with the current clinical guidelines and recommendations. This is compounded by the plethora of research articles published and difficulty accessing these articles due to subscriptions required. Several apps have been designed to help students manage this. These apps display relevant news articles and journal articles based on the student’s preferences. Students can select to view the articles now or save them. Articles that are interesting can be stored for future reference. If an article requires a subscription for viewing, these apps will simply prompt the student’s institutional
Recommended: Medscape [Figure 3] - Available on iOS/ Android/Kindle Fire. Alternatives: Epocrates
ACCESSING RESEARCH AND EVIDENCE-BASED JOURNALS
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Mobile apps have changed how students learn medicine in clinical settings. Numerous apps have been designed to provide succinct clinical information about various pathologies instantaneously. This allows learning to occur within a clinical context, which has been shown to increase learning retention [4]. These apps provide information to help students understand, diagnose, and treat a disease using a user-friendly 187
Vo and Gupta: Enhancing productivity and learning using mobile “Apps” for medical students
Figure 1: Docphin provides students with convenient access to the latest medical news
Figure 2: Dropbox allows students to access their documents while using mobile devices
interface. Relevant medication information such as doses, administration routes and side effects, are available in the buildin drug database. The resources are frequently updated and the apps can be used without a signal connection.
ENGAGING WITH COLLEAGUES Recommended: Twitter/Facebook - Available on iOS/Android/ BlackBerry OS Being able to connect and engage with colleagues is vital to learning. Studies have shown that learning in a social environment encourages students to extend one’s own thinking abilities as well as their peers in order to problem solve and master complex ideologies [5]. Social media allow users to share and disseminate ideas quickly. These mediums allow users to connect instantaneously with particular individual or groups that otherwise wouldn’t be possible [6]. 188
PHOTO SHARING IN THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY Recommended: Figure 1 [Figure 4] - Available on iOS During training, it is important for medical students to appreciate the clinical manifestations of pathology they learn. The use of pictures to supplement learning can help reinforce and help recognize clinical manifestations of diseases, especially those that are not commonly seen during training [7]. Studies have shown that recognition is heightened when items are presented as pictures as opposed to words [8]. Figure 1 is a photo-sharing app that was designed to share pictures of diseases with the medical community [Figure 4]. The app has several features to ensure patient confidentiality, including an automatic face-blocking feature. It also has tools to edit the photos taken (add arrows, crop features out, add a caption, etc.). Users can comment, search or save pictures for future references. J Contemp Med Edu ● 2014 ● Vol 2 ● Issue 3
Vo and Gupta: Enhancing productivity and learning using mobile “Apps” for medical students
Figure 3: Medscape provides reliable and concise information that is easily organized into appropriate headings
VIEWING DOCUMENTS Recommended: Kingsoft Office [Figure 5] - Available on iOS/ Android. PowerPoint slides are commonly used by faculty members and have been shown to have a favorable impact on note taking quality, content recall during exams and holding the student’s attention during the lecture [9]. Therefore, it is important to be able to view PowerPoint slides and other types of documents. Kingsoft Office allows students to view documents that they commonly receive during their training. This app also syncs to virtual storage devices such as Dropbox to allow students to view documents conveniently. Students can view edit, and save files in several formats (word processing, PowerPoint slides and spreadsheet). Once the file is viewed on Kingsoft Office, it is automatically stored for future reference.
VIEWING PORTABLE DOCUMENT FORMATS (PDFs) Recommended: Adobe Reader [Figure 6] - Available on iOS/ Android
Figure 4: Figure 1 provides a vast resource of unique conditions and cases seen in the medical community
PDF is widely used as the method to present information with a fixed layout. Journal articles and electronic medical textbooks are often provided to students in the PDF format. Adobe Reader is the standard for viewing and annotating PDFs. It is the only program that can open and interact with all PDF files [10]. The Adobe Reader app allows students to make annotations to documents, such as highlighting. Furthermore, this app allows users to view bookmarks or chapters of a PDF for quick reference, and it has a built-in medical dictionary. If students use the Dropbox app, they are able to import files into this app.
MEDICAL CALCULATIONS AND CLINICAL DECISIONMAKING SUPPORT
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Recommended: Calculate by QxMD [Figure 7] - Available on iOS/Android/BlackBerry OS It is sometimes difficult to remember the calculations and clinical criteria used to help support clinical decisionmaking. Calculate by QxMD is a medical calculator and a clinical decision-making support tool. It features clinically relevant tools specific to 17 medical specialties to help 189
Vo and Gupta: Enhancing productivity and learning using mobile “Apps” for medical students
Figure 5: Kingsoft Office shows document files, such as PowerPoint slides in an intuitive format with the notes section visible
Figure 7: QxMD prompts students to select the most appropriate answer choice for their clinical case in order to help with clinical decision-making
the content learnt in higher education [12]. Students can pause, rewind or fast-forward these recordings to match their learning pace. MedicalRadio is an app that allows students to listen to concise and high-yield medical lectures from medical professionals. It features audio lectures organized into medical specialties, and it contains live streams. Figure 6: Adobe Reader allows students to annotate portable document formats and has the ability to define medical terms
students make decisions regarding diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. When a specific tool is selected, it prompts the students with clinical parameters they should be aware of when making the decision. Once all parameters have been taken into consideration it provides a summary of the results and their interpretations.
AUDIO RECORDINGS OF MEDICAL LECTURES Recommended: MedicalRadio [Figure 8] - Available on iOS/ Android/BlackBerry OS Mobile devices are capable of playing audio recordings. In a 2008 study, one-quarter of medical students reported listening to audio recordings while traveling [11]. Taking advantage of this feature can help enhance productivity and learning. There are numerous medical recordings that allow students to learn and review topics. The use of features found in audio recordings has been shown to decrease the learning time and increase
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TRIAGING E-MAILS Recommended: Mailbox - Available on iOS E-mailing is often the primary method to communicate with colleagues and preceptors. Managing an e-mail account can be time-consuming and important e-mails can go unanswered or be missed. Mailbox helps students manage their e-mails more efficiently. It takes advantage of the different touch screen hand gestures on mobile devices to triage e-mails effortlessly. A short swipe to the right will send an e-mail to the archive, a long swipe to the right will delete it, a short swipe to the left will make it reappear at a later time and a long swipe to the left will place the e-mail into a different folder you created. When an e-mail is opened, it displays it in a “conversation” format where students can expand previous e-mails to read if needed.
CONCLUSION Mobile devices and apps are common among medical students. This article highlighted how apps can benefits students with suggestions of practical apps. Taking advantage of these apps
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Boruff JT, Storie D. Mobile devices in medicine: A survey of how medical students, residents, and faculty use smartphones and other mobile devices to find information. J Med Libr Assoc 2014;102: 22-30. Statista. Apple App Store: A Number of Downloads 20082014. Statistia; 2014. Available from: http://www.statista.com/ statistics/263794/number-of-downloads-from-the-apple-app-store. [Last retrieved on 2014 Jul 08]. Chen B, Denoyelles A. Exploring Students’ Mobile Learning Practices in Higher Education. Educase Review; 2013. Available from: http:// www.educause.edu/ero/article/exploring-students-mobile-learningpractices-higher-education. [Last retrieved on 2014 Jul 08]. Brady TF, Konkle T, Alvarez GA. A review of visual memory capacity: Beyond individual items and toward structured representations. J Vis 2011;11:4. Bruce CD. What works? Research in practice. Ontario Government; 2007. Available from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/ inspire/research/bruce.pdf. [Last retrieved on 2014 Jul 08]. Diff E. Facebook vs. Twitter; 2013. Available from: http://www.diffen. com/difference/Facebook_vs_Twitter. [Last retrieved on 2013 Aug 18]. Witmer WK, Lebovitz PJ. Clinical photography in the dermatology practice. Semin Cutan Med Surg 2012;31:191-9. Defetyer MA, Russo R, McPartlin PL. The picture superiority effect in recognition in memory: A developmental study using the response signal procedure. J Cogn Dev 2009;24:265-73. James KE, Burke LA, Hutchins HM. Powerful or pointless? Faculty versus student perceptions of power point use in business education. Bus Prof Commun Q 2006;69:374-96. Adobe. Adobe Reader; 2013. Available from: http://www.get.adobe. com/reader/. [Last retrieved on 2013 Aug 18]. Evans C. The effectiveness of m-learning in the form of podcast revision lectures in higher education. Comput Educ 2008;50:491-8. Evans C. The effectiveness of m-learning in the form of podcast revision lectures in higher education. Comput Educ 2007;50:491-8.
Figure 8: Medical Radio provides a wide array of audio recordings for students
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can help medical students enhance productivity and learning during their training.
Source of Support: Nil, Conflict of Interest: None declared.
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