I started Memorise Medicine near the end of my pharmacy internship. Sometimes that feels like a lifetime ago and sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.
The startup journey has been pretty tough. Feedback and advice is probably the most important thing when trying to start a business. It’s just a small step, but I’m really happy to have had a small group of students, from Monash Uni’s Victorian Pharmacy Students’ Association (VPSA), finally test Memorise Medicines.
In this post, I’ll include the advice VPSA students gave. This will serve as a checklist for updates to come.
Creating An Interactive Tutorial
| VPSA Advice | Comments |
Status |
| Can be a little difficult to navigate without a startup guide
Signing up was an easy process, and the “cards” to read seem really informative yet summarised. But it felt a little hard to navigate around the modules when “studying” them, as there’s no explanation as to what we’re meant to do after we’ve read the answers. Might be easier for users if there was a tutorial option where it shows you around the website and what the custom module has to offer.
Was a bit confusing at the start to understand the main function of memorise medicines is needing to recite the information.
Maybe a tutorial or little prompts to click on the “class” or “labels” would help, it was not obvious to me when i was attempting to study a module.
It’ll be nice to have a help page at the start of the module to show how it works.
A tutorial of how to navigate the website when signing up would be useful. I would still recommend memorise medicine though since I think it’s very useful.
If you are new to the page, you do not know what you are supposed to be answering about each card. It would be helpful to include what is expected to be answered on the image page of the card, for example Dose, Indications, Adverse Effects, counselling. Even if they are just to the side, so it is easier to know what we are being asked. |
I had a feeling, we would get a lot of feedback about needing a tutorial. We tried to make it as user friendly as possible without one. But I guess some of the functions only really make sense in my mind.
We are having a bit of issues implementing one correctly. But it is our number one priority for the next update. |
Highest priority |
Creating An App
| VPSA Advice | Comments | Status |
| Will you be making it into an app? Would be great to practice on public transport and would be easier to use than the internet on phones.
If this were to be turned into an app with pop up cards, might make it a lot more interactive and easy to use. The website itself could use some extra information or pop up points when someone is making a custom module to help them navigate that section better. Daily reminders daily notification or pop up on the phone about random medication I have found it hard to learn |
An intern, I tested Memorise Medicine with in 2017 asked if I was going to make it into an app. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I just thought I needed to make the website more mobile friendly.
My personal biased probably got in the way a bit there. For ages, I didn’t see the need to use the Facebook mobile app and I hate how reddit always ask you to use their app. Another reason for not considering an app was, I didn’t see the benefits of it over a mobile-friendly website. Luckily the students gave suggestions that proved me wrong. “daily notification or pop up on the phone about random medication I have found it hard to learn.” This is an excellent idea. Currently, mobile web browsers don’t have the ability to do this. Though I am seeing mobile pop-ups becoming more sophisticated.
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Due to the huge additional cost and time. We’ll have to save this as a reminder for the future. |
Other
| VPSA Advice | Comments | Status |
| Good being able to mark as easy moderate or hard. A good addition would be allowing a user to directly add existing cards on modules into their own personal module without having to recreate each card, or like a star feature allowing users to bookmark difficult cards for later use.
More options to select the specific medicines you want to learn about initially |
Currently, we add cards into modules via tags. This can result in a lot of cards being imported into a module. Students can turn off seeing cards by marking them as “learnt”.
If my understanding of this is correct, we should add the ability to add specific cards into modules. This is a good idea. We’ll probably include it in the next update, after the interactive tutorial.
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In next update. |
| maybe bolding or highlighting the key points could help
ability to add onto our own information to our cards (can be local) |
Two really good points here about giving students more freedom to make notes and adjustments to their own cards.
Currently, we have a note system in place. I’m picturing this more like a scribble function. So students can directly write next to notes or highlight or underline key points. |
Very good idea. It’ll probably take some time though.
Future update. |
| add scheduling, also have an end screen/pop up when we are done with a day’s learning rather than just leave it on the last card that was done | This is a good point. Some of it will be covered in the interactive tutorial. | Next update. |
| Cater it to each different health professional e.g what would medicine student need to know about the medicine compared to a pharmacy or nursing students. At the start you can have arrows guiding people what to do and info box. This would be helpful | Great comment. Eventually, Memorise Medicine will be unique to each health profession.
As the information pharmacy students need to learn (to be specific, medicines) has the most overlap between the different health disciplines that is where our current focus will be. |
Future update. |
| Some mode of action of a specific drug class can be added into each module. | Great suggestion. I’ll need to consider how much detail to include. When I was at uni, it was not enough to just write the mode of action listed in the AMH as an exam answer.
I like mode of action, as it’s shorter than mechanisms of action. However, I don’t want to miss lead any student in thinking what we write is enough for their exam. At the same time if we decide to include more detail (more like a mechanism of action) it could be too long for a flash card. I’ll probably need to speak to a few students about this. |
Follow up with students, in next advice and feedback form. |
| Include more OTC options where possible | Good suggestion. I’ll create a ready-made module with the idea of passing the OTC section of the pharmacy oral exam. | Should be pretty quick to do. Maybe in the next month or next update. |
| Possibly links or references to other sources for the particular medication to show the chemical structure of the active ingredient used.
Link it to APF or mimsonline for every medicine |
References are always a good thing. And Memorise Medicine should be no different.
The problem will be in getting some sort of license from MIMS or APF to link to them. In the meantime, we could do links to sections of the medicine’s PI (this is where MIMS get’s a lot of their info from). This could be quite time consuming though. |
Future update. |
| May be more engaging if there is a more active component available, rather than just reciting | Good suggestion. We’ll probably start including modules of CYP enzymes and just straight question and answer, similar to the written intern pharmacy exam. | Future update |
| More subtypes in each module
(e.g. pain -> headache) |
Easy done. We’ll start adding more tags to cards. | Starting now and will be ongoing. |
| May be more engaging if there is a more active component available, rather than just reciting | Good suggestion. We’ll probably start including modules of CYP enzymes and just straight question and answer, similar to the written intern pharmacy exam. | Future update |
| Some of the answers are very wordy – it might be useful to have a section to write answers down so it was easier to compare to the model answer provided. | Interesting point. I had not considered having the option for students to input answer in these modules.
Having students input an answers means they have committed what they would say/write in an exam. I’ll probably leave it as a self-assessment tool and not have the system automatically choose how difficult it is based on their response. |
Future update |
| Maybe each ready-made module could have a different image used as to easier select and differentiate between them | Easy done. | To be done in the coming up weeks. |
Lot’s of new things are coming. Be sure to stay tuned.
Cheers,
Bon
(Founder of Memorise Medicine)