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Virtual patients to the rescue
A glance at the current issue of Academic Medicine: Virtual patients to the rescue
At a time when real patients are in and out of the hospital so quickly that medical trainees often don't have enough time to study their symptoms, "virtual patients" -- computer-based simulations of real-life clinical scenarios -- are a valuable, but expensive, teaching tool.
A Harvard researcher teamed up with two administrators from the Association of American Medical Colleges to study how extensively medical schools in the United States and Canada were using virtual patients, and how other medical schools might share the benefits of using such tools.
The researchers found that virtual patients are extremely effective in teaching clinical skills and providing students with feedback. For instance, virtual patients, as opposed to standardized patients (actors pretending to be sick) or life-size robotic mannequins, can take a medical resident through nine years of care of a patient with diabetes in a two-hour span.
Virtual patients were being produced by 26 of the 108 medical schools that responded to the survey, mostly for primary-care disciplines such as pediatrics and internal medicine. The cost for an individual "patient" topped $50,000 at a third of the institutions, and exceeded $10,000 at 87 percent of them. On average, each computer-based patient took 16 months to produce.
The primary author of the article is Grace Huang, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and educational-technology director at the medical school's Carl J. Shapiro Institute for Education and Research. Her co-authors are Robby Reynolds, director of educational resources for the AAMC, and Chris Candler, the association's director of educational technology.
A few schools were reluctant to share their virtual patients because of the time and money they had spent on them, but many supported the idea, the authors say.
"Given that most developers have expressed a willingness to share their programs, we encourage interinstitution collaboration in using virtual patients, which may, in turn, broaden funding support of these tools and advance research evaluation of virtual patients," the authors write.
The article, "Virtual Patient Simulation at U.S. and Canadian Medical Schools," is available on the magazine's Web site.
— staff
Chronicle of Higher Education
2007-04-26
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