rocketsurgery99: Long-awaited ACCP 9th Antithrombotic Guidelines now available from CHEST. #AT9 http://t.co/s5EpNasR
ACCP-SEEK App for iPhone/iPod Touch Updated With Pulmonary and Critical Care Content
ACCP has just launched Version 2.0 of the ACCP-SEEK App for iPhone/iPod Touch. The new version is now a free download, and includes 10 free questions in sleep medicine. It also contains all 200 questions from ACCP-SEEK Volume XVIII: Critical Care Medicine and 200 questions from ACCP-SEEK Volume XIX: Pulmonary Medicine. You can read more about the app HERE or view a demo video HERE (or see the imbedded video at the bottom of this blog post). To find the app on iTunes, go to the iTunes store HERE or launch your iTunes Store and search for ACCP-SEEK.
Something to note: the initial app download is big, so you need to either download the app to your computer, and then synch it with your iPhone or iPod Touch, or make sure your device is connected to wi-fi. It’s too big to download directly over the 3G network.
If you’ve never downloaded an app before, you’re in luck – I wrote about how to do that a couple of weeks ago. And we’ve developed some step by step instructions on how to download the ACCP-SEEK app here.
Now, I don’t intend to use this blog for plugging products very often, but we’re pretty excited about the new version of the app. First of all, it can be downloaded for free and contains a free set of 10 questions. Second, we added 400 questions that will test the limits of knowledge in a broad range of pulmonary and critical care topics. Those questions and the previously available sleep medicine questions are available for purchase in the app in sets of 10 questions at $9.99 per set.
Those of you familiar with ACCP-SEEK already know that it’s a case-based study tool that is developed for Board Preparation or for general self-directed learning. It has questions that test recall, interpretation, and problem-solving skills. Most of the questions are case-oriented and include a detailed discussion and references for further study.
The iPhone/iPod Touch app does even more, because it includes features we could never put in a print product, such as:
- Text highlighting
- Text notations
- Voice notations
- Smart searches by keyword
- Searches by 2 different educational taxonomies
- Pinching and zooming of figures, or view figures sequentially in the figure viewer
- References link out to PubMed abstracts
- And more
One important thing: currently, CME is NOT available for the iPhone version of ACCP-SEEK. This is for a number of reasons, part of which is that iTunes does not provide purchaser information, so we don't have a way to map the purchaser of the app to the ACCP CME system and authenticate them for CME. We apologize for this inconvenience, and hope to find a workaround in the near future.
As promised above, here’s the video demonstrating all the new features of Version 2.0:
Enjoy! We hope you'll find the app fun, educational, and user-friendly. As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated.
About the Author
Stephen Welch
Senior Vice President, Communications
Executive Editor, CHEST
Executive Editor, CHEST
This blog, "It Ain't Rocket Surgery" is intended to help busy health-care professionals find useful online and mobile resources that will enhance their self-education and professional research efforts, or point out important topics of discussion related to online information and content. The blog's title is a Yogi Berra style mash-up of two common phrases, "it ain't brain surgery" and "it ain't rocket science". I hope it will be casual, fun, insightful, and -- most of all -- educational.
You can follow me on Twitter.
I currently serve ACCP as the Senior Vice President of Communications, as well as the Executive Editor of CHEST, the ACCP’s flagship journal. During my 15 years here, ACCP has focused on growing and developing the editorial, technological, and business aspects of the College. We are constantly striving to make the journal and other ACCP educational content as accessible and useful to clinicians as possible.
When not at work, I like to spend time scuba diving with sharks, collecting original comic book artwork, exploring the digital world, and searching for good BBQ.
Your feedback about the blog is always appreciated. So are tips on good BBQ joints.
Comments
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Price Feedback
Hi, and thanks for the feedback on the app pricing.
This is ACCP's first app, and there was a lot of internal discussion about how to price it. The ACCP-SEEK Pulmonary and Critical Care print editions are $200 each and contain 200 questions each ($1 per question). The Sleep Medicine print edition is $100 and contains 100 questions ($1 per question). And there's a lot of content in these products. It's not a small app that just does a couple of things like calculate ABGs. It's a 300 page book converted into an interactive mobile product fed through an app interface.
From the expense side, we had to pay a developer to create the app, and of course Apple takes a 30% cut of all iTunes App Store transactions.
So we asked ourselves, how should we price something that has all the content from the print editions, but allows the user to highlight, take voice notes, pinch and zoom images, link out to the abstracts of the references, etc? Actually there were suggestions to price it higher than the print price because of all that additional functionality, and to make up for the development costs and Apple's cut, but others thought that would definitely be too expensive.
The eventual decision was to price it the same as the print product at around $1 per question. At $9.99 per set of 10 questions, the app has the same content as the print product, but many enhancements and functionality that print could never have. And by breaking it up into sets, it could be purchased in bundles of questions rather than all at once at $100 or $200 per edition. Kind of like, buy as much or as little as you like, or can afford. Maybe buy 20 questions here or there and another 20 or 30 later.
We will continue to develop new apps, and we'll keep your comments in mind as we figure out the best way to package and price them.
Best regards,
Steve
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