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Practical Steps for Moving Forward:Virtual Patients

Chris Candler, M.D.

MedBiquitous Annual Conference

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Virtual Patients

Definition: An interactive computer simulation of real-life clinical scenarios for the purpose of medical training, education, or assessment.

•Several schools are developing•Very costly to create•No common framework that would allow these virtual patients to be shared across systems

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Virtual Patient Architecture

• Component based approach

• Enables sharing and reuse of entire virtual patient or components

• U of Edinburgh, Pittsburgh, NYU, Tufts, Karolinska Institute implementing

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A Time of Rapid Progress

• Successful development of prototype VP specification (in testing)

• Our thinking about utility, efficacy, and practicality has matured

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An Interest in Sharing

• Outstanding VP development by many institutions – desire to share

• Tufts grant from Hewlett Foundation to support open source VP player

• Karolinska institute’s WebSP and new tool to support exchange of VPs across institutions

• E-ViP Project: the emerging multi-national bank of Virtual Patients

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Virtual Patient Next Steps• Sustain excellent progress of MVP specification• Gain attention of other VP developers• Identify technical and educational challenges

(and solutions) to sharing VPs• Patience

“Americans always do the right thing . . .

after they’ve tried everything else.”

- Winston Churchill