Prevalence and Purpose of Medical App Usage In Pakistan: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Objective: To determine the prevalence and purpose of medical app usage in Pakistan. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted using a pretested form, distributed via Google Forms. Convenience sampling was used to select a sample of 357 MBBS, BDS, Allied Health, and Nursing students of CMH Lahore Medical College. Data was analyzed using “SPSS version 23.0”. Descriptive statistics were calculated as frequencies. A “p-value” of less than 0.05 was deemed statistically significant. Results: Out of all the participants (357), 40.3% were males, and 59.7% were females, with an average age of20.89 ± 1.61. 95.5% of the participants used intelligent devices, and 86.6% were aware of the medical apps available for use on mobiles. A majority (64.1%) of the students had various medical apps installed on their phones. Almost half of these students (45.1%) were advised by medical educators to use different medical apps for their studies. Most of the students made use of medical apps to search for medical information (49.7%), followed by exam preparations (37.6%), Revision (34.6%), and preparation of presentations (26.4.%). The use of general clinical textbooks and clinical skills guide apps were 22.2% and 23.9%, respectively. 20.5% of the participants did not use Medical Apps for any purpose. A Likert scale showed that students think that Medical Apps are easy to obtain, and many of them frequently use them too. They believe that these apps save time during clinical practice. Medscape was the most common app being used (29.3%), followed by Gray’s Anatomy (25%) and Pharmapedia (23.9%). Conclusion: The common usage of medical apps was recurrent amongst medical students

Keywords

• Medical Apps
• Medical Students
• Smartphones