Building a virtual patient commons

Abstract

Virtual patients as a form of educational intervention can take many forms and can provide highly effective ways of addressing reduced student access to real patients, the need for standardised and well-structured educational patient encounters, and opportunities for students to practice in safe and responsive environments. However, virtual patients can also be complicated and costly to develop. As a result collaborative and distributed development is best suited to their widespread take up. This paper considers the development and use of virtual patients and the steps that have been taken to support authors in making this approach more sustainable and adaptable. In particular, this has involved the development of a common data interoperability standard, which in turn has engaged a number of communities that have developed, or are developing, virtual patient commons, consisting of shared resources, tools and knowledge for mutual benefit. The paper illustrates how innovative and otherwise difficult to sustain models for supporting and extending healthcare education, such as virtual patients, can be supported using a commons approach with commonly agreed data standards and specifications at their core.

Virtual Patients for assessment of medical student ability to integrate clinical and laboratory data to develop differential diagnoses: Comparison of results of exams with/without time constraints

“…These learning tools are frequently referred to as Virtual Patients (VPs), but have also been labeled Interactive Simulated patients, Simulated Cases or Avatars Ellaway et al 2008;Andrade et al 2010). VPs may be used throughout the medical school curriculum including pre-clinical courses .…”

Patient Simulation Software to Augment an Advanced Pharmaceutics Course

“…1,2 Physical interaction between faculty members and students can be diminished. High costs can be overwhelming obstacles to colleges and schools incorporating technology into the curriculum.…”

Construction and implementation of a comprehensive hematopathology virtual teaching set

“…Whether or not the trainee is able to generate a logical differential diagnosis and knows the most appropriate tests which would distinguish between the different entities is difficult to evaluate in our current testing format. Virtual simulation is an important training tool that is increasingly being used in medical education, and if well designed, a virtual simulation linking to case material within a comprehensive virtual slide set could test the critical thinking skills required to work through difficult cases [11][12][13][14]. Future efforts will focus on incorporating the virtual teaching set in virtual simulation testing for hematopathology.…”