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Abstract
Smartphones are popular technologies that combine telephone communications and informatics in portable devices. Limited evidence exists regarding their effectiveness in improving academic performance among medical students. This study aims to assess whether a smartphone application could improve academic performance in multiple-choice tests. A double-masked randomised trial was held among interns at the School of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaiso. Participants were randomised to receive an application designed to review key concepts in Internal Medicine and its subspecialties using clinical vignettes. Contents were selected and provided in a format akin to a mandatory national examination required for practising medicine in Chile. Analyses were undertaken under the intention to treat principle and missing data were handled using multiple imputation techniques. Eighty interns volunteered to participate in this trial, most were female (48 students, 60%) and had a mean age of 25.3 ± 2.2 years. Participants showed significant experience with smartphones, with a median use of 4 years (IQR 3–6 years) and 67 (83.7%) reporting routine use in clinical practice. Intention-to-treat analyses showed significant improvements in performance amongst students allocated to the smartphone application (mean increase of 14.5 ± 8.9 vs 9.4 ± 11.6points, p = 0.03). A reduction in total time and mean time per question was also found, which was significant in complete-case analyses (p = 0.04). Smartphones were popular among medical trainees. Academic performance was significantly improved by the use of our application, although the overall effect was smaller than expected from previous trials. This study provides evidence that smartphone-based interventions can assist in teaching internal medicine. ClinicalTrials NCT02723136 .
Highlights
Smartphones are popular technologies that combine telephone communications and informatics in portable devices
This study aims to determine whether the implementation of a smartphone application designed to assist in delivering key concepts relevant to internal medicine might improve academic performance in Examen Unico Nacional de Conocimientos en Medicina (EUNACOM)
Most interns reported routine use of smartphone applications in daily practice (67 students, 83.7%), but only a third of them acknowledged using them for academic purposes (31 students, 38.8%)
Summary
Smartphones are popular technologies that combine telephone communications and informatics in portable devices. Martínez et al BMC Medical Education (2017) 17:168 interest in new technologies and those with prior experiences with these platforms [7] Despite this popularity, there is limited evidence regarding the effectiveness of smartphone use in improving academic performance among medical students [9]. In 2011, Low and coworkers published one of these studies using objective clinical competence scores as a primary endpoint [10]. The latter trial reported a statistically significant improvement of roughly 15% in the academic performance of students allocated to receive the application. Similar findings were seen in a second, before & after, study that was conducted among Obstetrics & Gynecology residents [11]
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