The authors of the piece define virtual patients as multimedia, screen-based interactive patient scenarios. They argue that virtual patients can deepen learning, promote clinical reasoning expertise, improve learning outcomes and reduce medical errors. The authors also predict that virtual patients and their medical scenarios will grow in sophistication — offering complex, hands-on training to future medical professionals.
Marc Triola, MD, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine and one of the authors of the perspective piece, said, “Current virtual patients are largely one-size-fits-all…future virtual patients will be able to incorporate data from other systems, such as the electronic health record, to tailor the content and level of complexity of the cases to the needs of each specific learner.”
There is another, perhaps more obvious, advantage to using virtual patients in educational settings.
“Virtual patients allow students to learn without putting real patients at risk,” said Norm Berman, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H., and the lead author of the Academic Medicine article. “No actual patients are harmed in the process of learning from virtual patients.”
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