Enhancing Pharmacology Education Through Collaborative Innovation: The Evolution and Future of PRORENATA at an Engineering-Based Medical Program.

Abstract

Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CI MED), the first engineering-based medical program in the United States, approaches teaching medicine with an engineering innovation mindset. This approach is reflected in PRORENATA, a pioneering web application designed to address the challenge of incorporating longitudinal pharmacological concepts consistently throughout a curriculum. PRORENATA aims to alleviate resource burden and maximize the learning of pharmacologic concepts through concept mapping. A pilot version of PRORENATA was launched in 2023 and demonstrated general usability. This report shares the design and initial implementation of PRORENATA, a novel web-based medical educational resource to support medical student learning of pharmacology and its clinical applications. Following PRORENATA's pilot, a collaborative effort was established with MedTerms, another developing medical education resource, to further enhance PRORENATA. MedTerms, created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, uses visualization design and an innovative software user interface buildout to facilitate learning of diseases from foundational principles. PRORENATA's distinguishing advantage is its foundational support by technical experts (designers, software engineers) and medical content experts (medical students, medical educators, medical specialists), ensuring content accuracy and relevance. Specifically, PRORENATA provides a visual organization of content in a tree-like structure, classifying content by class or disease states (e.g., hypertension, acute coronary syndrome, etc.). When the user clicks on specific drugs, more detailed information is revealed, including mechanism of action, key indication, common side effects, and contraindications. Each image within PRORENATA links to its source page. Ultimately, PRORENATA is a student-designed and created resource application to enhance pharmacology education.