HeadToToe: A Mobile Medical Knowledge dissemination platform: strengths, limitations and preliminary usage assessment.

BACKGROUND: Finding readily accessible high-quality medical references can be a challenging task. HeadToToe is a mobile 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 paper is to describe the architecture, user interface and potential strengths and limitations of an innovative knowledge dissemination 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. Through an administration interface, content is managed by senior University and Hospital staff. The application includes the following sections: (1) main section of medical guidance, organized by clinical field; (2) checklists for history-taking and clinical examination, organized by body systems; (3) laboratory section with frequently used lab values; (4) favorites section. Each content component is programmed to be available for a given duration as defined by the content's author. Automatic notifications signal the author when the content is about to expire, hence promoting its timely updating and reducing the risk of using 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 and at the University Hospitals of Geneva in Switzerland. A total of 622 students in the University and 613 health professionals in the Hospital downloaded the application. Two thirds of users had an iOS device in both institutions. During practical examination period (May 2019) there was significant increase in number of active users (p = 0.003), user activity (p = 0.0008) and daily usage time (p = 0.0004) within medical students. In addition, there were 1,086 clinical skills videos views during this period compared to a total of 484 in preceding months (108% increase). On a ten-level Likert scale, students and physicians rated the app with mean scores of 8.3 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.