Anki Flashcards for Radiology Education

From online textbooks to educational social media posts, digital learning tools are transforming medical education. Spaced repetition programs are a popular tool, with 70% of first-year medical students reporting using the free, open-source flashcard application Anki.1 The Anki program pairs active recall and spaced repetition learning principles with a simple but versatile user interface.2 Spaced repetition flashcard programs such as Anki are uniquely suited to radiology education because they strengthen image-based recall, a necessary skill for radiology trainees to develop. In this review, we will describe the science behind active recall and spaced repetition programs, introduce the Anki platform, and describe future directions for its potential as an educational resource for radiology.

Healthcare price transparency in North America and Europe

Healthcare price transparency is an effort to inform patient decision-making, but also to decrease prices and their variation across healthcare systems for equivalent medical services. The initiative is meaningful only for medical services that are shoppable-such as imaging examinations-for which patients incur out-of-pocket costs. Therefore, several countries in which patients commonly share a portion of their healthcare costs have been implementing mandates to improve healthcare price transparency. However, the provisional implementation has many issues, especially in the United States, including provider non-compliance and limited accessibility of price transparency tools by the general public. Many of the existing tools are not user-friendly, are difficult to navigate, focus on charges and health plan negotiated rates rather than patients' out-of-pocket costs, and disclose prices on the service level instead of per episode of care. As such, the disclosed amounts are often not reliable. Many price transparency tools also lack valid and measurable quality metrics, which can result in a selection of high-cost care as a proxy for high-value care, as well as an increase in healthcare prices when providers want to imply they offer high-quality care. Nevertheless, the impact of the initiatives on patients' decision-making and healthcare costs remains unclear. While transparency initiatives are patient-centric, efforts should be made to increase patient engagement, provide accurate patient-specific out-of-pocket cost information, compare available treatment and provider alternatives, and couple price information with quality metrics to enable making fully informed decisions.