Dr Antony Chu, co-founder of The Learnery, says it’s time to change how we learn and retain information in today’s digital world
Technology has transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives; yet education, especially in healthcare, remains largely traditional, with textbooks and exams as the standard approach. Webinars and conferences often provide valuable information but fail to ensure that individuals truly understand and retain what they’ve learned. Similarly, healthcare systems typically offer training during orientation and through annual sessions, but these one-time interventions don’t guarantee ongoing competency or knowledge retention.
Dr. Antony Chu, a board-certified cardiologist, clinical cardiac electrophysiologist and co-founder of The Learnery, believes this traditional system falls short of leveraging how humans best learn and retain information. According to Dr. Chu, education must move beyond passive dissemination of information to active, adaptive, and measurable learning that ensures competency in real-world applications.
A Director of Complex Cardiac Ablation, Arrhythmia Services Section at Brown University, Dr. Chu leads a team of clinical cardiac electrophysiologists and scholars and has received multiple awards and grants for his outstanding basic and translational research in cardiac electrophysiology, molecular therapeutics, and functional imaging. He is passionate about applying data analytics, DeepONet/Transformer based algorithms and machine learning to medtech innovation and clinical software-as-a-medical device solutions.
It’s not surprising that he has developed a software teaching and proficiency platform, The Learnery, which embraces microlearning to benchmark and evaluate the knowledge of clinicians and healthcare workers. The Learnery’s proprietary microlearning approach breaks complex concepts into microlessons, proven to increase depth of knowledge and enhance retention. The Learnery platform is adaptive and employs knowledge checks to ensure users retain up to 80 per cent of content in their long-term memory. In his opinion, education needs to harness the best adaptive algorithms and AI to help busy students and professionals accomplish their goals.
Why did you want to work in healthcare?
Dr Chu: As a college freshman, I witnessed a horrific bike accident. No one knew what to do, and I felt completely helpless. That moment inspired me to learn basic first aid and eventually become a paramedic. I loved the organised chaos of emergency situations and knew I wanted to dedicate my life to healthcare.
I was fortunate enough to have great opportunities in some of the best medical institutions in the world. I went to Yale Medical School, University of Pennsylvania and Brown University where many of my mentors created the field at hand, which is cardiac physiology. I’ve been very lucky to be able to be in the presence of some impressive people in a time when you couldn’t hide behind technology. Then, the Harvard Macy Institute awarded me an innovation grant that really helped me develop some of the concepts for The Learnery. It was a great honor as it’s the premier medical education authority — back in the day it designed the curriculum for Harvard Medical School.
So how does The Learnery work?
The Learnery is powered by an adaptive algorithm that evaluates a user’s fluency on specific topics and delivers tailored content. It takes a weighted view on how likely it is that an individual will be able to understand and answer the question. The engine that drives The Learnery is rooted in much of science that surrounds how human minds not only learn new information, but also how they retain it.
The concept of microlearning has been around for a long time in education. The Learnery focuses on educational content that someone might need for a particular course. The adaptive algorithm that I developed pushes very important and thoughtful questions based on that course subject to the user’s mobile. They answer them and on the back end, the algorithm remembers if the answer is right or wrong.
There are two objectives – the first is the series of content that, overall benchmarked against a class of peers, will help reach an objective more quickly. Our format is multiple choice, best answer. Within the solution set, there are links embedded to give a deeper dive.
This information decides the kind of content that is pushed now and when will it be pushed back as a question. In this way, we can measure not only how much knowledge someone has and how much they have retained, but also how that translates into the performance benchmarks. At the end of the day, clinicians make decisions that impact human lives, and The Learnery ensures their knowledge and skills meet the highest standards.
What was the ethos behind The Learnery’s origins?
The aim was to optimise the engagement piece. The younger generation learns very differently and what makes our platform unique is that it’s completely driven off a mobile device. It is automated in a way that it can be operating almost in real time. The Learnery content is really no different from anything that I’ve been teaching for three decades. By leveraging technology, we can make learning more meaningful and effective.
The Learnery is a platform technology, so the content is a separate variable. It’s plug and play, like an engine that can be dropped into any type of car. There are many workforce labour applications for companies and entities that need their staff to be trained and assessed in real time. The key here is that the assessment tool is very quantifiable. The algorithm measures how performance changes and it can be driven to assess and optimise any human performance.
I work a lot with AI and we embed some of it into the platform software. In my opinion, technology exists to facilitate human performance, not define it. I’ve seen how the impact of technology affects human performance over time. There’s an inflection point where the technology is so good at mimicking human performance that human performance becomes absent. This absence is critically important in medicine because, no matter how sophisticated someone tells you that the technology is, if you don’t have a human who can understand what it thinks it’s doing and why it might be wrong, that’s catastrophic. The idea that somehow it can replace human performance in human critical thinking is tragic because, again, the technology should be developed to facilitate, not to replace. And I just want this point to be really clear.
Can The Learnery technology be used to further medical innovation?
People would be terrified if they really understood how archaic modern healthcare technology is. There is no real-time medical grade channel of communication for healthcare systems anywhere in the world. Our platform can actually be used to serve a very important purpose – to connect people in times of crisis.
The COVID pandemic was like a war where none of the soldiers could communicate with each other. Similarly, healthcare providers are completely isolated. There’s no channel of medical communication in real time. What would really be amazing is to use these types of platforms to provide a dynamic way of assessing the multiple different challenges we have in any situation. For example, mobile devices could capture data that’s relevant, whether it’s biometrics from the patient population at the scene, images of rashes or different types of serum-based tests. That data could be pushed back towards a central location to be processed.
How important is the Middle East for The Learnery?
We’re going to be onsite in the Middle East in early 2025 because, when it comes to developing these types of technologies, the US is far behind. Most of the current decision-making technology in medicine is all discrete data points that are static in the past, meaning that we’re really-at-best reactionary and we can’t predict. For this reason the Middle East is especially important because these countries are interested in new avenues.
In medicine, like many professions, the key opinion leaders reach the career pinnacle very late and there are massive gaps in the understanding of the technological capabilities. The people who control the resources lack the knowledge and understanding of technological capability. Thus progress is impeded because they are the decision makers. That’s why the Middle East is so progressive. What happens right now is going to determine what happens for the next 100 years. It’s important to get these systems in play and do it in a way that’s impactful. We already have innovations such as nano sensor technology embedded in textiles that can measure different massive amounts of biometrics, or the Apple Watch which captures information. Such products will change everything in terms of how we think about ourselves, how we take care of ourselves, and how we ultimately make decisions. It’s truly exciting to be part of that future.
What does success mean to you?
Success is about the process. Innovation requires resilience because there will always be sceptics. For me, it’s not about achieving a specific goal but continuously pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The biggest challenge for innovators is that people are always going to tell you that you’re crazy.
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