Virtual Patient Simulation at U.S. and Canadian Medical Schools

Grace Huang, Robby Reynolds, Chris Candler
Academic Medicine Vol 82 No 5 May 2007- Educational Strategies

Interesting state of Virtual Patients (VPs) paper. They reviewed the "Virtual Patient" simulators of 108 schools. It seems most of them are doing an online flash/video approach. The point out that the cases do not generally exhibit ethnic diversity, so that may still be relatively unique to our system. The goal of the paper was to promote sharing of existing cases and future collaboration. Some of them present a longitudinal care of a patient, something our system is still far from providing. They also expose students to diseases and conditions they would otherwise miss, similarly to our future plans, but generally in a less immersive way. Since it was such a broad set of VPs they were nonspecific about what the systems actually consisted of, some of them may be as immersive as ours, though there were only 4 that were workstation based, they didn't mention VR at all. More than that, only 5 offered different outcomes based on user decisions. Though you can't kill our patient with bad decisions, you may misdiagnose.

Quality: 5
Relevance: 5

Since the primary point of the paper was collaboration, I was thinking, how could we promote collaboration with our system? It seems to me, creating a symbiotic online system to go with our VR system could lead to significant benefits. The primary one being, many more cases. I'm picturing a php or ASP.net based script creator. People could interact with the scripts using text only input, or even Windows based speech recognition. We'd basically need to reproduce simpy's text functions online, which would be a large work, but not infeasible. We could run a study on how the scripting tools are used, and, left to their own devices, what scripts the doctors really want. With the new feedback system for what questions are actually recognized, we could get a decent view of the quality of the scripts. All in all, it would give our system a much larger audience and that large distribution could give it a better chance of becoming the Xerox of Virtual Patients. Just an idea, though I'd like to hear feedback.