Lexington, KY - It’s apt that the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy has created an innovative, but easy to use, app that will help pharmacy students nationwide. That’s because UK’s Pharmacy College is consistently ranked among the top five pharmacy schools in the nation.
The new app was created to help students prepare for the national pharmacy board examination. Passing this exam is required to obtain a pharmacist’s license in every state.
“This is part of our effort to meet students where they want to be met,” said Dr. Frank Romanelli, Associate Dean for Educational Advancement at the UK College of Pharmacy. “Smartphones and tablets are as much part of pharmacy education as the mortar and pestle today, and we believe that this product is filling an important market need.”
The new study aid was created by Romanelli and Jeff Cain, Director of Distance Learning and Information Technology for the College of Pharmacy. Cain said they also had input from the College of Pharmacy’s Dean Timothy Tracy.
Called the “NAPLEX [for North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination] Exam Prep” app, the product is essentially an electronic flash card system of questions and answers. It covers material about drugs, pharmaceutical practice, and other matters that pharmacy students must know to pass their licensing exams.
The questions were drawn from a mock NAPLEX exam created by Romanelli for an elective course he teaches. “He’s the subject matter expert,” Cain said.
A major advantage of the new app is its anytime accessibility. It will allow students to test their knowledge with the convenience of their mobile devices. If they have their smart phones with them they can study anywhere.
“We wanted the app to be accessible and spontaneous,” said Cain. “We designed it so students could take a quick quiz whenever they had a few minutes to spare – while riding on a bus or during a lunch break, for instance.”
UK’s approximately 130 graduating (fourth year) pharmacy students will each receive a free copy of the new app. Cain said that one UK fourth year pharmacy student told him that she’s already “addicted” to studying with the app.
Graduating students in other pharmacy colleges—roughly 10,000 annually—will have to pay $19.95. They can buy the app on Apple’s iTunes store now. It will be available soon on Google Play.
Cain and Romanelli started working on the new app in spring, 2012. The hardest part of the process, Cain said, was “all of the University regulations to work through. We contracted, through the University, with a vendor who has experience in developing academic apps.”
Initially the app creators went to UK’s IT Department. Staffers there said that while they could do the programming it could be done more quickly and cheaply by an outside vendor who routinely did such work.
UK’s Department of Purchasing solicited Requests for Proposals. Romanelli, Cain, and representatives from UK Purchasing and UK IT departments then evaluated the proposals and bids to choose the vendor.
The actual programming work took less than two months, but more time was required to set up accounts to receive money from sales and contract with Apple to have the app sold in its online store. UK’s legal department had to check every contract and document.
The app is not like a patented discovery based on a UK professor’s research. It’s not intellectual property whose sale results in profits that are shared between a professor and the University.
“Frank and I aren’t receiving any income from the app,” Cain explained. “It’s an innovation and it adds to the reputation of UK Pharmacy as an innovative place.”
Nonetheless, the app creators wrote an internal business plan to figure out what it would cost to bring the app to market. They estimated when it would break even and when it would begin to turn a profit.
“We’re overly budget-conscious in this College,” Cain said. “We wanted to do it without using taxpayer dollars.”
The NAPLEX Exam Prep app is a product of clickblue, the College’s online educational platform that provides professional development offerings to pharmacists anywhere.
“I applaud Drs. Romanelli and Cain for their creative approach in developing the NAPLEX app,” said Tracy.
He continued, “The most successful organizations in the world deliver their content via mobile technology, and as one of the nation’s leading colleges of pharmacy, we are committed to being at the forefront in all phases of pharmacy education.”
The College is working to grow clickblue, leveraging the talents and creativity of the nation’s 5th-ranked College of Pharmacy to create a new paradigm of skills enhancement models.
“Clearly, higher education is evolving,” said Tracy. “We, too, are evolving with it. Like many professions, the practice of pharmacy continues to change. The College created clickblue as a resource to help serve our graduates and all pharmacists throughout their careers.”