Saturday, June 30, 2012

Virtual teaching hospital aims to transform medical training

LEICESTER, England – A computer system enabling medical students to practice diagnosing and managing patients in simulations using real patient data is being developed in an interdepartmental collaborative project between UK-based Leicester Medical School and the Computer Science Department at the University of Leicester.

The software development, led by Professor Reiko Heckel in collaboration with Dr John Barry Omara, will improve supervision of medical students during their clinical placements and provide feedback on their diagnoses and treatment choices through a Web-based medical decision support system.

The way it is designed to work is that in simulated context, medical students will talk to patients and put the clinical symptoms signs and laboratory or radiological data into the system, which then makes suggestions as to possible diagnoses. The students then have to interpret these suggestions and give reasons for their conclusions.

The project grew from an idea from Dr Omara, part-time lecturer at the School of Medicine, to improve healthcare in rural areas of Africa, and has evolved through a number of past and on-going projects by computer science students. In its present form as a training tool for medical students, it will not be used to treat hospital patients.

The "Virtual Teaching Hospital System" project is carried out in cooperation with Dr Omara and in consultation with the Department of Medical and Social Care Education.

Professor Heckel said: "This is an ongoing series of group projects for second-year computer science students. Five groups of six to eight students each work on the project for one term. We are about to begin another round of group projects this winter to extend and improve the system and we will carry on offering it as an option to our students as long as there is a significant amount of work to do on it.

Dr Omara said: "The project, when implemented, will make it easier to explain and teach the complex process involved in making clinical diagnosis (The Clinical Thinking Process)."

Dr Jonathan Hales, Department of Medical and Social Care Education, said: "The value of the system lies in the way the VTHS can be used by medical students to explore 'what if' scenarios - i.e. 'what if this same patient presented with the same symptoms and signs but also with a temperature (or, but without the abdominal pain)?' The value of the system does not therefore lie solely in its ability to come up with useful differential diagnoses, but in its educational capacity, when used by a thoughtful, questioning, exploratory student."

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