Creation of mHealth content aimed at medical students

Dear Sir

In the recent article ‘Health professionals as mobile content creators: Teaching medical students to develop mHealth applications’, the author (Masters, 2014) presents his findings from his work encouraging students to create mHealth content aimed at patients. I read this article with great interest as a medical student at The University of Manchester who has recently created an iBook aimed at educating other medical students.

I wanted to supplement and enhance the clinical skills teaching at the Manchester Medical School (MMS) by creating an iBook to give students a definitive guide to performing a Cardiovascular Examination. With a small amount of help from the faculty and no previous experience of content creation I was able to write an iBook using the iBooks Author application available for Apple computers.

I chose the iBooks Author application as all students at MMS are supplied with iPads upon entering their clinical years. Therefore by using the MMS iTunes U course and the Apple iBooks Store it was quick and easy to distribute the iBook to students who wanted the additional help with their learning.

iBooks Author is an intuitive and simple piece of software. It was easy to create an attractive and professional text in a relatively short amount of time. In a four week Personal Excellence Pathway (PEP) I was able to film the critical parts of the examination, photograph the clinical signs seen in the Cardiovascular Examination and write all the text required for the iBook. After being reviewed by two senior cardiologists at the University Hospital of South Manchester the iBook is now included in the MMS iTunes U course as a part of the cardiology curriculum.

Therefore perhaps it is worth expanding the program available at the Sultan Qaboos University to include the different methods of creating mHealth content (applications, ebooks, web content and others) and expand the potential targets of the mHealth content to include Medical Students and Doctors.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no declarations of interest.