Medical students' expectations towards an implementation of a family medicine textbook as a comprehensive app in Germany

Abstract

Undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in general practice is complex as a wide medical spectrum needs to be covered. Modern guidelines demand students to be able to recall immense amounts of information relating to the diagnosis and management of clinical problems. With the intent of making a medical textbook digitally available on student mobile devices, preferences of students and potential of the idea was aimed to be researched. A total estimation among fourth year medical students at the Leipzig Medical School was conducted in June 2013. Students were asked to answer a semi-structured self-designed questionnaire regarding their detailed smartphone and app usage as well as their attitude and expectations towards education and practice supporting apps. The response rate was 93.2% (n = 290/311). The majority (69.3%) were female students. The mean age was 24.5 years. Of the respondents, 64.2% owned a smartphone and 22.5% a tablet computer. A total of 32.4% were already using medical apps for the smartphone--mostly drug reference or disease diagnosis and management apps. Regarding their wishes, 68.7% would like or very like to see an app on general practice. The respective means of the most important desired features on a Likert scale reaching from 1 (not important) to 5 (very important) were 4.3 for drug reference information, 4.2 for guidelines for differential diagnosis, 3.9. for medical pictures libraries and 3.9 for physical examination videos. The willingness to pay for a profound app averages at 14.35 Euros (SD = 16.21). Concluding, students clearly demand for an app on general practice. Such an app should ideally be smartphone optimized. Aside of what is usually available in traditional textbooks, multimedia features such as videos on examining methods or a medical picture library are very important to students and may help to bridge the gap between text-based knowledge and practical application. Therefore, authors of medical textbooks need to be aware that the development of an app is no trivial technical translation as raised students expectations demand for multimedia and interactive features as well as comprehensive drug information. Further research should focus on developing concepts to bring together developers and university professionals as well as experienced medical specialists to enable the development of apps that satisfy the demands of undergraduate and postgraduate educational needs.

Fig. 1

The result of grouping the used apps into the five different categories and the distribution of its frequencies among students who regularly use apps

Fig. 2

The average score (mean ± SD) towards the functionality of a general practice app based a Likert scale reaching from 1 (unimportant) to 5 (very important; n ranges from 247 to 252 due to missing answers)