Jake Robinson graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in 2023, and having been through multiple hospital placements as a student, he was acutely aware of how this on-the-job training can fail young doctors.

“Clinical placements are the most important part of medical training,” he says. “It is the point at which students go onto the wards, meet patients, take histories and conduct examinations while shadowing more experienced physicians. However, in reality, the process is often quite unstructured.

“Once a student speaks to a patient, they are told to go to a senior doctor to get feedback on their history taking, to identify gaps in their knowledge and guide their further learning. The major problem with this 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, and this is becoming an even bigger issue as workforce pressures increase and medical student numbers are set to rise by 27 per cent over the next three years.”

Robinson has set up OnWard education to improve how medical students build their knowledge during clinical placements.

“There can be 350 medical students from a cohort in hospitals across the country on any given week, and the traditional means of assessment and monitoring is through paper logbooks, sign-in sheets and ultimately exam results. This is tedious for students and brings little in terms of learning benefits. We’re aiming to change this,” Robinson says.

In a nutshell, OnWard is an AI-assisted platform that enables student doctors to take more control over their on-ward education. The student takes the patient history as normal and presents their findings to the platform (via an app) to get immediate feedback on how they’ve done. This comes in the form of a score with prompts on how to do better next time. The patient information that gets 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 to guide studying and improvement,” Robinson says.

“The OnWard app doesn’t replace clinical learning or senior physician oversight. It complements it and integrates into the current structure, turning what is normally a chaotic, subjective experience into something more measurable and trackable.”

The app doesn’t cover every medical eventuality, but for its commercial launch later this year, it is pre-loaded with information (written by doctors, not by AI) on more than 100 of the most common adult medicine conditions students are likely to encounter on the wards.

Apart from the student-facing app, OnWard also incorporates a university portal aimed at giving educators a fix on how their students are progressing, which students are struggling and where teaching content or methods might need a tweak.

“The idea for OnWard came directly from my own experience on the wards, both as a student and newly qualified doctor,” says Robinson, who is taking time out from the long shifts and unpredictable working hours to focus on building his company.

“I first began work on developing OnWard in 2024, and I have been building, testing and iterating since then with the help of a software development company. I have largely self-funded the €70,000 investment required to date with support from Fingal Local Enterprise Office and an innovation voucher from Enterprise Ireland.

“I am also working with support from the Learnovate Centre in Trinity College and with EdTech Ireland, and would eventually like to build my own team to take the business on to the international market.

“I am now beginning to trial the app with students, and the next step will be to partner with a university and launch at scale for the upcoming academic year.

“My aim is to make clinical training more structured and accessible and ultimately to build something that supports scale across medical schools internationally, as the same challenges exist globally,” Robinson says.

There is no shortage of existing education platforms or simulated learning for trainee medics, but Robinson says what sets OnWard apart is that it’s based around practical experience on the wards.

“Rather than simulated or scripted cases, we support real patient encounters, thereby closing the loop on the educational experience. And, unlike traditional student logbooks, our aim is not simply to record activity, but to help students actively improve and develop during their placements. The goal is to support existing bedside teaching.”

Robinson’s initial target market is B2B, bringing medical schools and universities on board for an annual subscription. A B2C version is also in the pipeline for a monthly fee. The platform will be open to all medical students regardless of where they’re studying.

“I suppose the biggest challenge the business faces is conquering existing inertia, as the current system ultimately produces well-trained doctors every year. Then there’s also the fact that healthcare and university systems can naturally be cautious around change and AI adoption, particularly in environments as important and regulated as medical education,” Robinson says.

“However, I believe there is a significant opportunity to make the process more efficient while improving both the student experience and the quality of training delivered. I have put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that the technology integrates naturally into existing teaching environments in a safe and meaningful way without adding additional workload for already busy educators and clinicians.”