In a little seen nugget published in an article of the Chronicle, the Ivy League medical school, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, will be requiring their incoming medical students to use the Inkling e-book app for key medical textbooks in their first year of medical school.

They will be requiring their incoming first year class to purchase iPads as well.

We have been the first to report how and why Inkling is a game changer in the arena of medical e-books when we reviewed Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology:

Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology for the iPad allows you to highlight, write notes, view innovative multimedia modules, and easily search for content — taking what you can do on a paper based textbook to a higher level — and taking e-learning to a completely different stratosphere.

The three key Inkling textbooks that will be required by Brown University’s medical school: Essential Clinical Anatomy, Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy, and Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking.

The medical school’s director of preclinical curriculum, Luba Demenco, had the following thoughts to share with the Chronicle on the iPad implementation into the curriculum:

….she was on the fence about whether to require students to purchase Inkling versions until she read through them herself. The interactivity and portability sold her, and should be a great plus for students, she says. “Being able to have an educational tool made all the difference.”

The chapter option, she adds, was not an important part of her decision. Indeed, Brown students will still be expected to purchase entire texts and retain them as a reference. Dr. Dumenco does think the chapter option could be useful for students looking to brush up on concepts—cell biology, say—that they were expected to have learned before medical school.

The chapter version that Dr. Dumenco is referencing is the ability to buy single chapters, a feature we spoke highly of in our original review:

The ability to buy individual chapters for $1.99 cannot be overstated. One of the worst feelings as a medical student is when you purchase an expensive book at full price, only to find you used only one quarter of the chapters or fewer.

Schools that have largely PDF based curriculums, such as Stanford, have had an easier time transitioning medical content to the iPad. Schools that have implemented an iPad curriculum that requires referencing textbooks have expressed their frustration with textbook publishers to iMedicalApps.  They have found “textbook silos” — the inflexibility of e-book medical publishers to share content and add functionality to electronic medical books — to be a hindrance of implementing mobile curriculums.

Although Inkling’s model could be pegged as creating another textbook silo — at least it creates a value added by its interactive nature and innovative pricing scheme.

At the end of the day, we’re definitely excited to see how Inkling continues to morph, and still feel it’s a game changer for medical education.  We’re happy that we’re not the only ones in the medical ecosystem that feel the same way…

Source: The Chronicle

iTunes: Inkling iPad app

The “dynamic medical textbook” we have been waiting patiently for might be one step closer to fruition.  Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology, a trusted textbook for medical student education, was just released on the Inkling platform. Inkling is a textbook application that was built exclusively for the iPad platform and features “interactive textbooks” — basically, bringing textbooks alive.

Once you download the free Inkling app, you are able to view various textbooks they offer.  Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology is one of these texts.  Another exciting medical e-book that will soon be released is Essential Clinical Anatomy.

There are two main features that make the Ganong iPad medical textbook extremely exciting: How truly interactive the textbook is via touch response based modules and videos — and the ability to purchase individual chapters for $1.99.  The full price of the textbook is $64.99, but the ability to purchase individual chapters is huge for a medical student — especially in regards to a physiology text, where you can pick chapters related to your weaknesses.  In the future we’d love to see the option to “rent” chapters, and this current pricing model may lay the foundation for such a feature.

In the following review we’ll take a look at a chapter in Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology for the iPad and go through the multimedia features, along with the robust annotation features available.

Chapter 4, titled “Excitable Tissue: Nerve”, is a sample chapter Inkling allows users to download for free to get a better understanding of how the textbook functions.  Once you click on a chapter, you are presented with blocks of content separating out the various multimedia features available.  Anytime you click on a particular block, you can go back and forth by swiping forwards or backwards, extremely intuitive.

Navigation and Text Viewing Options:

You are able to navigate in multiple ways in the textbook, using a toolbar located on the left side, or using the previously stated gestures.  Once on a page of text, you are give different viewing options, as shown below:

It was only a matter of time before partnerships between medical textbook publishers and the iPad development community emerged. One key partnership the Wall Street Journal just announced is between ScrollMotion (app developer) and McGraw-Hill’s Education division, with the purpose of developing e-books for the iPad.  And why does this matter? Because if you’re a medical professional, you most certainly have read or own a medical text from McGraw-Hill.

McGraw-Hill is the publisher of Harrison’s Internal Medicine, Schwartz’s Principles of Surgery, the Case-File series and many more medical texts.  They acquired Apple and Lange Inc in 2007, further expanding their vast medical library.  Many of us know of McGraw-Hill via Access Medicine, the online portal to their large collection of medical texts that is available in almost every academic institution in the country.

Many pundits feel the iPad’s use of an LED screen verse E-ink (think Kindle) will dissuade readers from purchasing the iPad for reading purposes.  The principle argument is the LED screen will cause more eye strain after prolonged use, but the medical community should embrace e-books on the iPad because we read textbooks in a different way than traditional readers.

Medical books are not often read cover to cover, instead key chapters are often referenced when needed.  Although the majority of medical professionals, myself included, will attest to reading Harrison’s frequently, it’s doubtful that any of us have read the massive text with the purpose of reading it front to back.  Also, could you imagine seeing key anatomic figures, pathologic pictures, and diagrams in E-ink text?  The dull black and gray colors would look awful.  On the iPad’s 9.7 inch 1024 x 768 pixel display, these full-color diagrams and figures would be far more aesthetically pleasing.  Viewing detailed anatomic figures would be especially useful, highlighted in one of our recent medical app reviews.

It should be noted that a flagship McGraw-Hill book, Harrison’s Manual of Medicine, is already in the App Store via other third party developers.  But we haven’t been impressed with the conversion of this medical text to mobile form, mainly because of the limited size.  Pictures and diagrams cannot be fully appreciated on the iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen.

Since the iPad’s iBook store will be competing directly with the Kindle, we can assume the pricing of these books will be similar.  Surprisingly, the Kindle does not have many of the McGraw-Hill flagship textbooks I mentioned above.  The limiting display factors that E-ink causes could be a reason these texts are not available.  However, McGraw-Hill does have many medical study guides in e-book form, such as the Case-Files series.  The Case-File e-books for the Kindle are priced at almost 40% discounts from the original text.  Although such a high discount is not likely, many of the medical reference texts available for the Kindle are discounted by approximately 20%.

This type of savings, along with the ability to search and review massive text books on a great display, should have the medical community excited about the prospects of e-books on the iPad.  Now if the developers can somehow add the ability to highlight and annotate using the rumored handwriting keyboard….but that might be too much to ask.