Case Study: Using Flashcard Hero for Continuous Medical Education

Meet Alessandro. He is a medical doctor from Catania (Sicily, Italy) and uses the Flashcard Hero app for his continuous medical education memorizing diagnostic criteria and pharmacological interactions between drugs.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about how he uses the app in his day to day work.

What is your name and what do you do?
My name is Alessandro and I’m a medical doctor (I just graduated).

What do you use the Flashcard Hero app for?
I use the app to memorize diagnostic criteria and pharmacological interactions between drugs.

Roughly, how many cards did you write and study so far?
It depends. When I have enough time I can study between 50 and 100 cards a day. I write between 10 to 20 cards a day, when I study a new topic.

What has been your biggest success with the app?
The app gives me the possibility to be more precise when I have to prescribe drugs or diagnose a pathology. So it helps day by day.

Do you use the app together with other people?
I’m trying to convince my colleagues that spaced repetition is the greatest way to memorize a lot of information.

What does your typical workflow look like writing cards?
I read my medical books and I highlight with a specific color whatever I consider useful to be memorized. Then I transcribe it to flashcards.

How about studying with the app?
When I’m waiting at the post office to be served or at night before resting I test myself to see if I remember what I have studied during the day.

Do you have any tips for others who are just getting started?
I think it is very important to focus only on what matters. Often medical books show information in tables. I just transcribe the content and than try to memorize it better and better.

Do you use any other tools or study techniques that you can recommend?
Before buying the app I searched Wikipedia for spaced repetition. It’s a very interesting approach that is different from the one I used in the past. After this initial research I wanted to know if the concept had any scientific background, so I searched on PubMed and I found some interesting papers, for example Smolen, 2016 “The right time to learn mechanisms and optimization of spaced learning”. There are many more references in the scientific literature showing the usefulness of that approach.