gms | German Medical Science

Background: Finding readily accessible high-quality medical references can be a challenging task. HeadToToe is a mobile smartphone and tablet platform designed to allow easy and quick access to sound, up-to-date, and validated medical knowledge and guidance. It provides easy access to essential clinical medical content in the form of documents, videos, clinical scores and other formats, for the day-to-day access and use by medical students and physicians during their pre- and post-graduate education.

Objective: The aim of this article is to describe the architecture, user interface and potential strengths and limitations of an innovative knowledge distribution platform developed in the University of Geneva, Switzerland. We also report preliminary results from user experience survey and usage statistics over a selected period.

Methods: The dissemination platform consists of a smartphone application (available on iOS and Android). Through an administration interface, the central database content is managed by faculty, educators and senior hospital staff. The application includes the following sections:

1.

main section of medical content and guidance, organized by clinical field;

2.

admission section with check-lists for history-taking and clinical examination, organized by body systems;

3.

laboratory section with reference frequently used lab values;

4.

favorites section where users can flag and quickly access their favorite content.

Each content component is programmed to be available for a given duration as defined by the content author. Automatic notifications signal the author when the content is about to expire, hence promoting its timely updating and reducing the risk of using of obsolete content. In the background, a third-party statistical collecting tool records anonymous utilization statistics.

Results: We launched the final version of the platform in March 2019, both at the faculty of medicine (for pre-graduate students) and at the University Hospitals of Geneva (for post-graduates trainees) in Switzerland. At the university, a total of 545 pre-graduates downloaded the application. During the exams period there was a 22% average increase in user activity and a 27% increase in daily usage time. On a ten-level Likert scale, students rated the app with mean scores of 8 for user experience, usefulness, and relevance of content. In parallel, postgraduate trainees viewed more than 6000 documents during the first 3 months after the implementation in the Division of Neurology in our institution.

Conclusion: HeadToToe is an educator driven, mobile dissemination platform, which provides rapid and user-friendly access to up-to-date medical content and guidance. The platform was given a high rate for user experience, usefulness and content quality and was used more often during exams period. This suggests that the platform could be used as tool for exams preparation.