Royal College of Surgeons graduate Jake Robinson has developed OnWard Education, an AI-assisted platform designed to give medical students structured, real-time feedback during clinical hospital placements, as reported by the Irish Times, addressing what Robinson describes as a systemic failure in how ward-based medical training is delivered.

Robinson, who graduated in 2023, identified the problem during his own student placements, where feedback on patient history-taking depended on the availability of senior physicians who were already stretched by workload pressures. He noted that medical student numbers are set to rise by 27% over the next three years, compounding the challenge.

"Clinical placements are the most important part of medical training," Robinson said. "The major problem is the lack of availability of senior doctors with the time to provide the necessary feedback. These physicians are already overworked with little spare time to spend adequately training medical students."

The OnWard app allows students to present patient history findings through a mobile application and receive an immediate score with prompts for improvement. All patient information sent to the app is anonymised.

"Their results feed into a personalised logbook enabling them to build a record of the patient cases they have seen, and there are data analytics to help track their performance over time, across specialities and relative to their peers," Robinson said.

A university portal accompanies the student-facing app, giving educators visibility over student progress, identifying those who are struggling and highlighting areas where teaching content or methods may need adjustment.

The platform will launch commercially later this year pre-loaded with information on more than 100 of the most common adult medicine conditions students encounter on wards, with all content written by doctors rather than generated by AI.

Robinson has self-funded €70,000 in development costs to date with support from Fingal Local Enterprise Office, an Enterprise Ireland innovation voucher, the Learnovate Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and EdTech Ireland.

Explore the full story of OnWard Education and its clinical training platform in the complete report.