As med schools embrace the iPad, tech companies are rethinking the textbook from the ground-up
CUPERTINO, CA – At the launch this past month of the iPhone 4S, new Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that, "80 percent of the top hospitals in the U.S. are now testing or piloting the iPad." That's a good thing, because a fast-increasing number of medical schools are doing the same. The iPad, it seems, is becoming as ubiquitous as the stethoscope.
One early adopter was UC Irvine School of Medicine, which last year gifted the entire class of 2014 with iPads pre-loaded with the first year's course work. This past September, Weill Cornell Medical College outfitted first- and second-year students with the tablets, which will be synched with EMRs for training.
Carol Storey-Johnson, senior associate dean of education at Weill Cornell, said the technology will help open "a world of new learning opportunities for students and dramatically expand the way we train and educate a new generation of physicians."
Other iPad-loving Ivies are also in on the act. Yale School of Medicine students are given 64GB models – to keep! – for downloading textbooks, logging course notes and even handling personal health information. And Brown University's Alpert Medical School has made it mandatory for first-year students to use an app developed by San Francisco-based Inkling to read certain medical textbooks.
Those developments are good news for vendors who specialize in developing technology and reformatting content for this still-new – but stunningly fast-growing – way of learning.
"We're at the very beginning of a dramatic shift in the way people consume content," says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, who admits to being "really surprised – and pleasantly so – at the rate with which institutions have committed to devices" like the iPad.
There are dozens of apps that allow users to read books on the iPad. But MacInnis is adamant that digital textbooks – insofar as they're only digital versions of textbooks – will never catch on. What's needed instead is to embrace the capabilities of the iPad, rethinking the very notion of what a textbook is.
Too many e-reading apps today are "like pulling the tape out of a VHS cassette and expecting to see frames – a very analog replication model," says MacInnis. "I think people will pay for that temporarily, but I just don't think that's in any way a scalable vision for the future.”
Very soon, he says, "the 'book' is not going to look anything like a book looks like today." And that's something he's been convinced of for a while. Inkling, with 70 or so employees, has already been around two years – even before the iPad was officially launched in 2010. "We had put a lot of thought in," says MacInnis, "based on the assumption that the rumors were true."
By moving beyond simple text and anatomical drawings, and making use of video, moveable 3D diagrams and interactive quizzes, companies like Inkling are leading to a sea change in the way medical textbooks are consumed.
"The publishers have a ton of great assets," says MacInnis. "What we do is provide processes and tools that allow for the rather rapid assembly of these different assets into something that is more custom-designed for an iPad." Publishers – Pearson, Wiley, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, McGraw Hill, Lippincott – work with Inkling, to take the original textbooks, "gently deconstruct all the different pieces, and then reassemble them," incorporating the eye-popping colors, sharp design and interactive bells and whistles that have made the iPad such a success.
The feedback from students so far? "Overwhelmingly positive." Professors? "Our biggest advocates." As such, Inkling will "be pursuing relationships with every med school in the country next year," says MacInnis.
Ousama Haffar, is vice president of Marketing at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Kno, whose 100,000 e-textbooks can be downloaded to tablet, the Web or even Facebook.
Haffar says Kno's "QuizMe" functionality, finger-swipe highlighting and text search capabilities, the ability to "spin, rotate, accelerate, zoom" three-dimensional anatomical figures and even a journal feature (which extrapolates everything marked as important while reading into a digital notebook for consultation at the end of the semester), is the wave of the future, as students increasingly expect education tools to be "engaging, efficient, and social.” Heavy hitters such as Intel, which along with media behemoth Advance Publications made a $30 million investment in the company this past spring, seem to agree.
"Kno is building technology," says Haffar. "We're not rebuilding books." More to the point: "We're building something that has purpose and meaning for students."
Textbook technologies like Inkling's and Kno's reinforce "learning and retention of information through a variety of multimedia," said Jason Korenkiewicz, assistant dean of education administration at Weill Cornell Medical College. Even more important, however, "along with being an amazing educational tool, the iPad tablets will give students an advantage as the healthcare industry increasingly embraces electronic systems."
