Pharmacy students get a technology assist to train for real-world practice
Adrianna MacPherson - Folio - 27 January 2025

Anupreet Sandhu, a clinical assistant professor in pharmacy, guides students through a technology-based learning exercise. (Photo: Tarwinder Rai)
Students in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences will have the opportunity to enhance their learning with the integration of a new technology platform, MedEssist. The platform provides a dynamic, realistic training environment that will better mirror real-world clinical settings, offering pharmacy students the opportunity to refine their skills before they enter the workforce.
MedEssist’s technology will be piloted in two patient care skills courses, Pharm 323 and Pharm 423.
“The pharmacy practice skills courses are really critical for pharmacy students as they bridge the theoretical knowledge with real-world application, focusing on essential skills like patient assessment and clinical decision making, in addition to the traditional skills related to drug distribution,” says Rene Breault, a clinical professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences who is leading the integration of MedEssist into the faculty’s courses.
“Incorporating these digital health technologies into these courses helps prepare students for that tech-driven health-care landscape, being able to foster skills in providing telehealth, virtual care and digital record management,” adds Breault, noting that the hands-on experience students get can enhance their ability and confidence in the modern pharmacy setting.
The platform will be introduced in second- and third-year courses, allowing first-year students to “develop that foundational patient care process without using any tools to assist them,” says Breault. It will complement the fundamental skills students hone throughout their pharmacy courses, offering them tools that can help with assessment, efficiency and training as the platform “simulates real-world pharmacy workflows.”
“We really want to boost confidence and empower pharmacists to use their skills to their full potential and to use technology in enhancing their ability to offer those services,” says Ryan Marsall, clinical project manager at MedEssist.
The tools available through MedEssist include assessment templates for minor ailments as well as templates for care plan documentation, travel health consultations and vaccine assessments. Another useful feature of the platform, Breault notes, is the ability to incorporate patient communication and documentation, which provides a more realistic simulation of a pharmacy environment. And because the platform can be customized for each user, faculty members are also working with MedEssist to design a few resources tailored to their needs.
“This gives us some flexibility within our program to create individualized templates or documentation templates that are suited to the particular activities we’re doing in the labs,” says Breault.
Two pharmacy students, Kennedy Jackson and Fanni Pupaza, worked with Breault and MedEssist to test out the platform and provide insights as they prepared to implement it in the initial two courses.
“We’ve been able to troubleshoot and come up with ideas for how the software can be best used for educational purposes,” says Pupaza.
They were also provided potential cases and areas that were developed for previous skills labs and tasked with seeing how MedEssist could be used to work through them.
“We went through to see places where we could tailor it to how the skills lab does things,” says Jackson.
Following the implementation in the two courses, the faculty intends to continue finding ways to integrate the platform in other second- and third-year skills courses to set students up for success by building their skill set with the increasingly tech-driven health-care industry in mind.