Re-imagining GP exam preparation through smarter learning
Dr Qi Zheng Ong (AceGP) shares how clinician-led, data-driven education is transforming how GP registrars prepare for Fellowship exams and build confidence for lifelong practice.
Can you please give a brief overview of your career to date?
We are both Australian GPs who have trained through the RACGP pathway and have built our clinical foundations in diverse settings, from metropolitan practices to rural and remote placements. Alongside our clinical work, we’ve always had a strong interest in medical education, digital health, and systems-level improvement.Over our careers, we found ourselves not only practising medicine but also mentoring junior doctors and medical students, refining exam preparation strategies, and experimenting with ways of making learning more efficient and evidence-based. That journey eventually led us to co-found AceGP, a tech-enabled education platform designed to modernise how GP registrars prepare for the RACGP Fellowship exams. Our work now sits at the intersection of frontline general practice
You are a leading GP in the health education space – what attracted you to diversify your career?
For both of us, education has been a constant thread throughout our careers, long before general practice. Between us, we’ve spent years tutoring, mentoring and building study resources; from high school and undergraduate teaching, to medical school peer-teaching and supporting GP registrars during Fellowship training. That early experience in teaching naturally evolved into developing structured programs and eventually co-founding AceGP, where we could scale high-quality educational support to registrars nationwide.
By the time we were GP registrars, education was already woven into our practice, but we noticed that exam preparation in general practice was still highly variable, inefficient, and largely under supported. Looking beyond our initial stages of offering tutoring to a small circle of students each year, we saw an opportunity to build something structured, scalable, and genuinely designed around how real registrars learn.
So our move into GP education wasn’t a “pivot” away from clinical work, it was a continuation of a pattern that started in high school and evolved with each stage of training. AceGP is simply the formalisation of a passion we’ve always had; helping others learn, but doing it in a way that actually works at scale.
What is the product/work you are leading?
We are the co-founders of AceGP, a next-generation learning platform built specifically for GP registrars preparing for the RACGP written exams (AKT & KFP). Our focus is not just content – it’s cognitive science, spaced learning, analytics, and exam performance coaching, all embedded in a single, smart platform.
AceGP is already used by multiple GP clinic groups and numerous individual GP registrars across Australia. Our goal is not just to help GP registrars pass exams, but to raise the standard of Australian general practice beyond route learning content for exams.
What do you see as some of the enablers and barriers to educational innovation in primary care in Australia?
There is a clear shift happening in GP education, as more registrars recognise that traditional rote learning and passive revision don’t match the way clinicians actually think or the way modern exams are structured. One of the biggest enablers is the move toward personalised, data-driven study; something which is already well-established in other high-stakes exams like the UCAT and GAMSAT, where candidates use analytics, adaptive learning, and structured revision rather than studying blindly. In contrast, those kinds of tools have been largely absent in GP specialty training, which is why platforms like AceGP are emerging to fill that gap. There is now growing acceptance that education in general practice needs to be structured, interactive, and tailored instead of one-size-fits-all.
The barriers are mostly practical, not philosophical. Registrars are studying while working full-time and often juggling family or on-call commitments, which makes consistency difficult. Supervisors do have protected teaching time, but they rarely get a full picture of a registrar’s knowledge gaps because most learning happens in the consulting room, out of direct observation. Many supervisors also trained years before the current AKT and KFP formats existed, so although they’re excellent clinicians, they may not be up-to-date on exam strategy, marking style, or common pitfalls. So even highly motivated trainees can feel under-supported, not through lack of effort from either side, but because the system hasn’t kept up to speed with how modern learning and assessment work. The opportunity now is to build education that fits into real GP life and gives supervisors, registrars, and training organisations access to the same data-driven picture of progress.
What do you think the future of general practice looks like?
General practice will continue to be the backbone of the Australian healthcare system, but the expectations on GPs are changing faster than ever. Medicine is evolving at a pace no individual can fully keep up with; new guidelines, new treatments, new screening pathways, and constant updates across every specialty. Unlike other specialists, GPs don’t get to focus on a narrow field; they are expected to know a bit of everything, all the time, from childhood rashes to complex multimorbidity to emerging pharmacotherapy. As careers progress, most GPs naturally develop areas of interest and attract certain types of patients, which means other clinical areas become less familiar and easier to lose touch with. The future of general practice will therefore rely on lifelong learning that is smarter than the current “complete 50 CPD hours and hope it sticks” model. We need data-driven systems that identify knowledge gaps, refresh areas we no longer see regularly, and support active recall rather than passive reading, so that GPs can stay confident, safe, and current across decades of practice, not just during training.
Why is it important GPs are involved in health innovation/new technology design?
Our work isn’t in clinical health-tech, but the same principle applies in education: tools designed for general practice only work when they’re shaped by people who actually understand the realities of the job. We saw that registrars needed smarter, data-driven learning support that matched how they study while working full-time, rather than relying on passive or outdated resources. That’s why GP-led input matters – whether it’s for AI scribes in clinics or digital learning platforms, the best solutions come from people who have lived the workload, time pressures and decision-making of real primary care, not from the outside looking in.
What would you say to early career doctors about general practice and primary healthcare?
General practice is the most diverse and rewarding clinical specialty you can choose. You’ll never see the same day twice, and you’ll use every part of your medical training. It’s a field where relationships matter as much as diagnoses, and where you get to care for patients over years, not just during a single admission. It also offers huge scope to shape your own career – whether you want to teach, do procedural work, build a niche interest, or balance medicine with family or other passions. If you want a specialty with flexibility, variety, autonomy and real human connection, primary care is an incredibly rewarding place to be.