Producer URL : www.prognosisapp.com
Producer’s Description
Prognosis: Your Diagnosis is an application freely downloadable from the iPhone App Store or the Android Market. It allows doctors and medical students to learn how to treat real life patients via an interactive cartoon style narrative. It is the first medical application on the iPhone to ‘gamify’ medical education. The application contains over 60 cases, each of which represents a common clinical scenario. It effectively promotes serious learning – as each case teaches important clinical points required in day to day medical practice. The game judges the doctors’ performance and lets him know how well he did, what went wrong (or right!)
Jurors’ Evaluation
Traditionally medical education involves tedious study of voluminous text books. This has been the bane on the life of many a medical student. Prognosis: Your Diagnosis seeks to take medical education to a different level – it is serious stuff but the process of learning is made fun.
Each case lists the history of the patient and the findings revealed through a preliminary examination. The ‘Doctor’ has to figure out what tests would be the most appropriate to perform on the patient and the best course of treatment. The application also has valuable information pertaining to the treatment of the patient with contributions from leading consultants – specialists physicians and surgeons in the given area - presented in the form of a discussion. Doctors ‘participating’ in the game can share their knowledge and experience on the case by posting a comment on the discussion. Importantly opinions are moderated, thus spamming is eliminated, but the system entertains both compliant and contrary opinions. The carton style narrative is very interesting and is certainly very unique in this very serious domain of medical practice.
The impact of this product is very evident from the fact that it was the #1 free medical app in the USA up to December 2010 and is still ranked within the top 50. Since its introduction to the Android market some four months ago Prognosis: Your Diagnosis has retained its place among the top 15 apps in that Market.
There are currently 500,000 users worldwide. Moreover it is recommended as a learning aid by six Medical Colleges in the USA and five in Europe.