Emerging Roles of Virtual Patients in the Age of AI

Abstract

Today's web-enabled and virtual approach to medical education is different from the 20th century's Flexner-dominated approach. Now, lectures get less emphasis and more emphasis is placed on learning via early clinical exposure, standardized patients, and other simulations. This article reviews literature on virtual patients (VPs) and their underlying virtual reality technology, examines VPs' potential through the example of psychiatric intake teaching, and identifies promises and perils posed by VP use in medical education. Virtual Patients in Medical Education Over the past 20 years, a revolution has taken place in the use of health care simulation. Technological advances in computational power, graphics, display systems, tracking, interface technology, haptic devices, authoring software, and artificial intelligence (AI) have supported creation of low-cost, user-friendly virtual reality (VR) technology and virtual patients (VPs). VPs are defined by the Association of American Medical Colleges as "a specific type of computer-based program that simulates real-life clinical scenarios; learners emulate the roles of health care providers to obtain a history, conduct a physical exam, and make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions." 1-3 VPs represent a fusion of simulation technologies and VR, which is generally defined as "a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment which can be explored and interacted with by a person." 4

Artificial intelligence technologies and compassion in healthcare: A systematic scoping review

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Embodied Virtual Patients as a Simulation-Based Framework for Training Clinician-Patient Communication Skills: An Overview of Their Use in Psychiatric and Geriatric Care

“…One approach, especially in the field of mental health (see Provoost et al, 2017) has been to use ECAs for diagnostic or remediation purposes, either as partners of social interaction (Georgescu et al, 2014;Tanaka et al, 2017b;Grossard et al, 2020), virtual coaches motivating the user (Torres et al, 2018;Ali et al, 2021), or even for virtual clinical interviews with real patients suffering from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or dementia (Stratou et al, 2015;Philip et al, 2017;Mirheidari et al, 2019). In addition, ECAs have also come to be used as 'virtual patients' (VPs), i.e., representing a patient alone or in a virtual environment and offering the trainee (clinician or student) the possibility to engage in a human-like face-to-face interaction (see Combs and Combs, 2019). As such, medical educational strategies are increasingly shifting toward the use of VP simulations, as they are more scalable and reproducible, being available at all times and places, while providing learning outcomes comparable to standardized clinical learning environments (Consorti et al, 2012;Quail et al, 2016), including improved skills when interacting with real patients (Cook and Triola, 2009).…”