We support High Schools on a case by case basis. MyDispense is designed for use in a Higher Education / University setting, with a focus on therapeutic decision making. If your school is in a district, you will need to confirm with your district before you can use MyDispense. Hosting a MyDispense site in a district can cause issues when multiple schools in the same district want to use MyDispense.
There can be technical issues setting up MyDispense for a High School to meet the technical requirements for us to host MyDispense. The set up can also take a long time due to privacy requirements. For High Schools the terms and conditions for MyDispense are non-negotiable. Other addendums we will take on a case by case basis.
Each institution is hosted on the web separately. Essentially you have your own server, so this will not be an issue.
We can accommodate about 200 students using MyDispense concurrently. A larger server than our standard will be required if you require more students utilising this concurrently.
We can work around this. We have created domains for our partners before (which is the main task that your local IT team undertake).
Yes you can if you have set up groups. You can customise the time allocations for each group.
There is a function where you can set questions to be ‘Must Ask’, ‘Can Ask’ and ‘Do Not Ask’. This will prevent students from asking all questions.
It varies based on what the assessment outcomes you are trying to achieve. There is flexibility on how you can use it for assessments.
Yes there is an assessment function in MyDispense and some items are automatically graded. Some items (i.e. label directions) will require manual marking as variations may occur from student answers. It doesn’t support quizzes (i.e. MCQs or SAQs)
A bit of both. Depending on the needs of the faculty and how the instructions are delivered. The advantage of MyDispense is that students can have practice as homework on their own (as many times as they wish). In labs, students are also able to use it in conjunction with role play counselling as well as discussions with tutors with more complex cases/exercises.
Developing the exercises within MyDispense does not take long. There are various guided fields that require completion but often will not take longer than 30 minutes to an hour. The first time doing this within MyDispense may take longer but faculty tend to master this quickly. Developing the case studies may take longer (depending on what type of cases), similar to any case studies you develop outside of MyDispense.
Students find it intuitive and am familiar with the simulation extremely quickly. Various universities have different approaches in orientation students to the simulation. At Monash University, there is no formal orientation on how to use the simulation. Students are given access to exercises and they are advised to explore with the guidance of a PDF User Guide.
Similar to students, faculty members find it intuitive if they explore the simulation and have a go at clicking and editing. From experience, it took faculty half an hour to familiarise with the basics of the simulation with the guidance of a PDF User Guide.
We are currently working on training videos for the new version of MyDispense.
The answers will be up to you to develop. There are pre-set answers if you do not input any into those field (i.e. the doctor is unavailable OR your patient does not see this doctor). You can input it as text or upload a voice recording.
Students need to select a patient from a list. Entering part of the patient name will filter the database results.
Yes, the status and schedule of a medication can be set in the medication inventory for each institution. Once you have MyDispense for your institution, you are free to make these modifications for your site.
This is deliberately not included in the simulation. The idea is so that students search this information as part of their learning instead of relying on prompts/warnings/pop-ups. Similarly, shorthand/ sigs in the directions is not possible as we encourage students to learn how to write directions on labels.
Yes. Just like any dispensing activity in reality, a pharmacist may make changes until handover of an item to the patient OR completion of the exercise.
Yes. Just like any dispensing activity in reality, a pharmacist may make changes until handover of an item to the patient OR completion of the exercise.
It could be both. There is the export/import function to share cases. There is also a search function with keywords to find activities/exercises. However this will also depend on the keywords used when developing cases.
There is a function within MyDispense where students can enter professional notes (notes for other health professionals) OR patient notes.
MyDispense allows you to customise and upload products and medicines from your country. The US version is already built and has a lot of medicines already preloaded from all legal classes.
It is developed to be virtual, hence everything is there for students to use standalone. However, it can be used in a blended mode if you wish to combine patient role plays alongside MyDispense use or discussions with tutors.