ANKI: Flashcards You Can Take Anywhere
Dexter Hadley, MD/PhD (Penn) · CANONIC Foundation
title: ANKI: Flashcards You Can Take Anywhere date: 2026-05-12 author: Dexter Hadley, MD/PhD (Penn) · CANONIC Foundation tags: [nex, abopm, ankinex, spaced-repetition, molpath, oncology, pgx, caribbean-governance] scope: BLOGS _generated: true generator: gen-nex-fleet-doc (do_not_edit) — _generated by gen-nex-fleet-doc
Spaced repetition as the foundation of board preparation. It is 6:43 in the morning on a Wednesday, and Marcus, a third-year resident in Kansas City, is on a train. His phone shows a flashcard. The card asks him to classify a BRCA2 variant from a 41-year-old patient with triple-negative breast cancer. He taps Hard. The conventional read is that a deck of flashcards is a study aid for one clinician in one chair. The actual rule is that a credentialed deck, reviewed by faculty, scored anonymously by every studying resident, is a community-wide instrument that tells the next author which evidence anchor still needs work.
What the App Is
The card came from ANKI, an Anki-style flashcard app built around the curriculum for board certification in precision medicine. Marcus did not write the card. Someone in the same field who has seen the variant before did, and two faculty reviewers signed it off before it shipped to the deck Marcus is studying. The app remembers that Marcus found the card hard. So do the other residents using it, anonymously. Cards that everyone struggles with will rise to the top of the next review.
The principle behind ANKI is older than smartphones. Spaced repetition — showing a learner a fact at the precise interval before it would have been forgotten — is one of the most studied techniques in education. Anki, the open-source desktop and mobile app from which ANKI takes its name and its interface, is already the way most medical students study for the Step examinations. What ANKI adds is governance: a way for the people who write the cards to be credentialed, the cards themselves to carry their sources, and the community of candidates to feed back which cards are working.
The result is a deck that is free to study, offline, on any device, written by clinicians for clinicians, and audited by the community in real time.
ANKI, CASE, ONCO, and OMICS are the four apps a candidate uses to prepare for board certification in precision medicine. The figure is rebuilt from the same source files that drive the apps themselves.
Who Built It
Practising clinicians, fellows, and senior residents draft the cards. Two faculty reviewers approve every card before it ships. An author signs the card; the reviewers sign their review. The first author credit on ANKI was paid in April to a Stanford genomic pathologist who contributed cards from a clerkship review.
What Is Verified About the Content
Each card carries the names of its author and reviewers and a link to the evidence behind the answer — a ClinVar entry, a CPIC guideline, a peer-reviewed paper. A card without an evidence anchor does not ship. When a card is edited, the new version carries new signatures and the old version is preserved in the running record.
Where It Fits in Board Certification
ANKI contributes to the molecular pathology, oncology, pharmacogenomics, and Caribbean-governance tracks of the American Board of Precision Medicine Foundation curriculum. The tracks are described in the chapters on each track inside the ABOPM book.
- Caribbean Governance (Ch. 15)
- Molecular Pathology (Ch. 11)
- Oncology (Ch. 12)
- Pharmacogenomics (Ch. 13)
What It Costs and How to Use It
Studying is free. Authoring is open to clinicians who pass the credentialing review. The app runs on the same iOS, Android, desktop, and web stack the open-source Anki app uses, and the decks are downloadable for offline use.
What Is Next
Live since 2026-04-19, with the first author credit paid to @marcus_freeman.
The Real Unlock
The unlock is not that residents can study on a phone. The unlock is that every Hard tap, anonymised, tells the next author which card needs a clearer answer. Reading the reasoning is the reverse of the question.
The Wider Picture
ANKI, CASE, ONCO, and OMICS share one permanent record. A flashcard, a case, a tumor-board thread, and a variant interpretation all sit on the same trail of evidence a candidate, a reviewer, or a board member can audit. For the full architecture, see Chapter 16 — Four Apps for Board Preparation.
ANKI is the deck residents take home, the deck reviewers sign, and the deck the community keeps honest.
Sources
| Claim | Source | Ref |
|---|---|---|
| BRCA2 variants and triple-negative breast cancer risk are characterised in the ClinVar and BRCA Exchange resources | BRCA Exchange | brcaexchange.org |
| ClinVar is the public archive of clinical variant interpretations maintained by NCBI | ClinVar (NCBI) | www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov |
| CPIC publishes peer-reviewed pharmacogenomic guidelines used in board-curriculum cards | CPIC Guidelines | cpicpgx.org |
| Anki, the open-source spaced-repetition app, is the established study tool for medical Step examinations | AnkiWeb | apps.ankiweb.net |
| Spaced repetition is one of the most studied techniques in cognitive psychology of learning | Cepeda et al. — Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks (Psychological Bulletin) | pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov |
| American Board of Precision Medicine Foundation curriculum tracks are governed in the ABOPM book | ABOPM (CANONIC) | hadleylab.org |
| First author credit paid in April 2026 to a Stanford genomic pathologist for the founding ANKI clerkship-review deck | ANKI ledger record | hadleylab.org |
ANKI | EDUCATION | ABOPM | BLOGS