Meet "The Pharms"

The Pharms is an augmented reality-based pharmacology flashcard app, designed for medical, nursing, & pharmacy students taking their first pharmacology course sequence.

It was created by a pharmacology professor for his students who were looking for new ways to make the drugs & drug facts they were being asked to memorize feel more relatable.

If you’re struggling to keep track of all the meds, if the information isn’t sticking, or if you’re just getting bored with your current study approach... try making a game out of it!

Test your knowledge & recall
of essential drug facts

Practice quizzing yourself and your classmates with these anthropomorphic pharm characters & flashcards on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet.
This app is a "starter pack" of over 70 of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US. You can look at them all at once, individually, or by organ system of their clinical use.
Each Pharm character comes with its own flashcard of drug information, which you can show & hide with a tap as you’re expanding your memorization & understanding.
(Oh, and when you’re done looking at a Pharm, you get to blast them off the screen.)

Tips for Students

How to Use the App

It’s up to you to determine how the app can help you most effectively learn—and retain—essential drug facts. When in doubt, open the app, pick a drug category, move your phone around, tap on the screen, and have fun with it!

A few ideas:

#1. Build an understanding of the meds by looking at the Pharms one- or two-at-a-time.

Tap on the screen and generate a new Pharm. At first all you see is the generic name of the drug and the Pharm character. (The characters are a little goofy, but having a visual might help jar your memory or make the med feel more “real”.) With the Pharm’s flashcard hidden, test your recall: Can you remember its class, mechanism of action, therapeutic use, and major side effects? Also, be sure to practice pronouncing the drug name, yes, out loud… it helps with retention!

Then, tap on the Pharm to reveal its flashcard. The front of the card has the more essential information, and the back of the card has more ancillary facts & a little flavor. To flip the card over (and back again), tap on the card or press the “Flip All” button. Look over the information on the card and let it sink in a little. If you need to resize the card, use the slider at the bottom or pinch & zoom anywhere on the screen.

Next, hide the flashcard and see how much you can remember. Hide the flashcard by clicking on the Pharm itself or clicking the “Show/Hide All” button. (You may have to hit the “Flip All” or “Show/Hide All” button up to three times… that’s because the buttons synchronize all the cards for all the Pharms, and it may take a few taps to get them in phase.) After you’ve given it your best effort, tap on the Pharm once more to reveal its flashcard and check your accuracy.

Finally, once you’re done studying the Pharm, it’s time to say ba-bye. Press the “Shoot” button once to aim, and once to fire. If you shoot a flashcard, the flashcard will disappear but the Pharm remains. (You can make the flashcard reappear simply by tapping on the Pharm or pressing the “Show/Hide All” button.) When you shoot a Pharm character, it & its flashcard disappear and are removed from the deck.

#2. Look at a large group of Pharms all together.

Tap all over the screen to generate all the Pharms at once and go through them in rapid succession. With their flashcards hidden, can you go through all of them in whatever order they appear and say a specific fact about each (e.g., name a major side effect or therapeutic use or the drug’s pharmacological class)?

Once you’ve tested your memory with flashcards hidden, click “Show/Hide All” to reveal them and see how well you did.

Reward yourself with a little bit of fun: Use the “Shoot” button and blast away every flashcard that you’ve sufficiently learned, leaving only the ones you need to study more remaining. (Reminder: If you shoot the flashcard, you can make it reappear by tapping on the Pharm itself or the “Show/Hide All” button… but if you shoot the Pharm character, the character & its flashcard will be removed from the deck and won’t return until you go back to the Main Menu.)

Because you’re using augmented reality, you don’t have to stay in one place. Walk around your room to better see the Pharms and use the scale bar or pinch/zoom to resize the Pharms and their flashcards.

Pharms on the floor with frontside flashcards

Tips for Instructors

Using the App in Your Course

The most important disclaimer is that this is a new app and 1st edition flashcards. There will inevitably be some technical bugs and factual corrections to be rectified before its “offical” release this summer.

The app is available free-of-charge from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. It uses basic augmented reality software already embedded in most smartphones and tablets with multiple rear-facing camera lenses, such as the iPhone 8 (& higher), iPad 2018 (& higher), Google Pixel 3 (& higher), and Samsung Galaxy S8 (& higher).

A few notes:

#1. Give students clear direction as to what they should (and shouldn’t) pay attention to.

The level of detail on the cards is intended to highlight essential drug facts (i.e., information worth memorizing) for intro pharm courses for medical, nursing, and pharmacy students; however, the facts are written in short-hand and absolutely require you (or their textbook) to provide context.

Make note of differences between the drugs included in the app and your course’s drug list. Included side effects heavily bias FDA boxed warnings. The listed therapeutic uses are biased toward primary care applications.

#2. Help extend the analogies to make the meds feel more “real” and be more memorable.

The intent in developing this app was to help students utilize metaphor and anthropomorphism to make the drugs we’re asking them to memorize feel more tangible. Please add your own flavor and knack for storytelling.

What additional analogies can be created to further the Pharm character-actual drug connections? For certain students, adding a bit of levity or relatableness to these abstract concepts positively impacts their retention and comprehension.

#3. Encourage the students to have fun and be creative as they’re building their knowledge base.

Pharmacology is challenging enough, particularly for students who are yet to experience the meds in clinic. Adding games and challenges to your course in order to create the “flow state” of learning described by Csikszentmihalyi may prove highly efficacious.

Our internal testing shows most students don’t read the app instructions... they just click on the screen, get amused, and figure out how to make the app work on their own. We made a 1-minute video [shown below] that covers the basics, if you’d like to share.

Drugs Included in The Pharms: Starter Pack

acetaminophen, acyclovir, albuterol, alendronate, alprazolam, amiodarone, amlodipine, amoxicillin, aripiprazole, aspirin, atorvastatin, atropine, azithromycin, bupropion, carvedilol, cephalexin, clonidine, clopidogrel, digoxin, diltiazem, diphenhydramine, docusate, doxycycline, empagliflozin, emtricitabine, enoxaparin, epinephrine, ethinyl estradiol, fluticasone, furosemide, gabapentin, glipizide, hydrochlorothiazide, ibuprofen, insulin glargine, ipratropium, ketoconazole, lamotrigine, levofloxacin, levonorgestrel, levothyroxine, liraglutide, lisinopril, lithium, loratadine, losartan, metformin, methylcellulose, methylphenidate, metoprolol, metronidazole, montelukast, nitrofurantoin, nitroglycerin, nystatin, omeprazole, prazosin, prednisone, propranolol, rivaroxaban, salmeterol, sertraline, sildenafil, sitagliptin, succinylcholine, tamsulosin, tramadol, trazodone, venlafaxine, warfarin, zolpidem

Future Expansion Packs

As the subtitle "starter pack" of this app implies, we intend to create a more comprehensive expansion to The Pharms app, which will include ~300 of the most commonly prescribed meds and pharmacological class prototypes that we believe all MDs, RNs, PAs, NPs, PharmDs, and DOs should know… but that project is still in process.

Factual updates to the Starter Pack flashcards and revisions to the design aesthetic of the Pharm charcters & user interface are also anticipated as part of the next major update and will remain free-of-charge.

A final note of fine print & ethics in the digital age

The app is intended as a no-cost/low-cost study tool with no ulterior motive or profit center. No user data (beyond the minimum metadata generated by the Apple App Store & Google Play Store) is collected. No data is shared with third parties. The app uses your camera to create the AR experience; however, no image data is collected.

No pharmaceutical company influence or support of any kind occurred in creating this app or selecting specific medications to feature. Drug brand names are included purely for academic purposes (i.e., their names being commonly referenced in clinical settings) and should in no way be contrued as an endorsement.