Designing and building mobile pharmacy apps in a healthcare IT course

Abstract

An important skill for students in information technology (IT) programs is that of collaborating with domain specialists while designing IT solutions. This is particularly true in healthcare IT, where usability errors can impact patients' health. Here, we describe a course project in which healthcare IT students collaborated with pharmacy students in a task analysis session aimed at specifying the steps in two common pharmacy scenarios. The healthcare IT students then went on to design and implement mobile apps, using AppInventor that were based on the two scenarios. The process benefited both groups of students; the pharmacy students learned about the IT design process, and the healthcare IT students learned about pharmacy workflow as well as communicating with healthcare specialists.

Democratizing Computing with App Inventor

“…Most college-level App Inventor courses are introductory courses for non-majors (CS0), but there have also been courses developed in other disciplines as well, including Health Informatics, e.g., [13], Business, and a Design/CS course co-taught by professors from both disciplines. [14] One of the first courses was a CS0 course taught by David Wolber at USF.…”