Medical app can improve doctors' skills
The app, which has already attracted users worldwide, generates tests which identify strengths and weaknesses in the user’s knowledge. It then focuses on the weaknesses providing tutorials on those aspects before generating further tests.
According to Tom Lynch, one of the founders of Experior, the app is part of a wider system which could be used by anybody with a speciality, even outside medicine, who wants to improve knowledge of their area.
The app is focused on Dr Lynch’s area of radiology but can be spread to all areas. Dr Lynch, a lecturer at Queen’s University and head of nuclear medicine at the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre, explained why it could revolutionise medical teaching.
He pointed out that nurses can be tested every year on their knowledge of infection control.
“The nurse gets 80% one year and the following year is retested as is norm in the health service north and south,” said Dr Lynch. “The nurse gets 80% again because it is the same questions. The person could go from year to year and learn nothing and continue to pass the test year after year.
“With our test, if you did it in year one and got 80%, when you came to take the test again in year two, it would have changed and would be more heavily weighted to the 20% you did not get right. Your result will drop and drop unless you put in corrective measures.”
Dr Lynch said the radiology app was particularly useful for doctors on a training rotation in emergency medicine, especially as a six-month study in London of those doctors had found that they learned nothing when it came to improving their X-ray diagnosis.
He said it is hoped to spread the technology across the medical sphere with health systems able to upload their own tests and create their own measuring tools.
