Using Virtual Patients In Pbl

Using Virtual Patients in PBL Bas de Leng School

of Health Professions Education

Prof.The dr. Netherlands Albert Scherpbier Maastricht University, Summer course Monday June 22, 2009

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

What is a virtual patient?

 

A virtual patient is a computerized problem solving case, allowing users to virtually explore and intervene in the case. Two components: 1. Patient case: patient data, where valuable in a multimedia format 2. Educational case: select content, interactivity, prompts and feedback for a specific educational goal (clinical reasoning, basic science knowledge)

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

An example of a VP

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

How to apply a VP in education?

Virtual patient

1) Implement

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

2) Integrate

Example 1: use in specialist training  All residents simultaneously worked out the same virtual patient.  Three times during the workout a ‘time out’ was scheduled in which the residents discussed their diagnostic reasoning.  The logged actions of the residents and their notes were point of departure.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Feedback tool  Feedback tool compiled and fed back the logged actions of the individual residents.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Example 2: in clerkship  Wrap-up week after a work placement.  VP presentation by a clinician complementing students’ presentations of real patient encounters.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Small group discussion  Audience response system: response to anonymous polling as a trigger for the discussion.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

How to use VPs in preclinical years?  VP used as a vehicle to present factual knowledge.  Embedding interactive images:  Adaptable scaffolding.  Drag & drop quizzes.

ADAPTABLE SCAFFOLDING

Full scaffolding (legend, hotspots, labels)

Minimal scaffolding (hotspots only)

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Other active learning with ICT…  Microscopy practical.  Virtual slides.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Other active learning with ICT……  Microscopy practical.  Virtual slides.  Collaborative learning:  shared white board  computer mediated communication

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Are you using VPs? Often stated barriers for VP use:  Costly and time consuming to develop.  Content and teaching method are not peer reviewed.  Developed for specific context on isolated topics, no comprehensive coverage of curriculum.  No structural funding for maintenance and update of VP collection.  Teacher and student concerns: replacement of teachers and real patients, added to overloaded programme.  No support for teachers in dealing with technical, pedagogical or strategic problems related to VPs.  No empirical data on design and integration of VPs.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

How to cope with these barriers?  Collaborative and distributed development of VPs.  Sharing VP collections: complementing, exchanging and reusing materials.

Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Questions?

Suggestions for further reading

– Homepage e-ViP project: www.virtualpatients.eu – Cook, D., & Triola, M. (2009). Virtual patients: a critical literature review and proposed next steps. Medical Education, 43(4), 303-311. – Ellaway, R., Poulton, T., Fors, U., McGee, J. B., & Albright, S. (2008). Building a virtual patient commons. Medical Teacher, 30(2), 170-174. – Huang, G. M. D., Reynolds, R. M. P. A., & Candler, C. M. D. (2007). Virtual Patient Simulation at U.S. and Canadian Medical Schools. Academic Medicine, 82(5), 446-451. – Huwendiek, S., Reichert, F., Bosse, H., de Leng, B., van der Vleuten, C., Haag, M., et al. (2009). Design principles for virtual patients: a focus group study among students. Medical Education, 43(6), 580-588. Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences