Monday, January 16, 2012

Virtual Patients: The Sequel

Then the real work of the project began. The student team met in order to outline the goals of the case series and identify the topics that we want to cover. Since case writing takes a formidable amount of time, we need to be judicious in the cases that we choose. We wanted to create online, interactive, evidence-based internal medicine virtual patient case series for clerkship students. We wanted to emphasize management and knowledge integration through explicit discussion of management rationale and making connections to clerkship skills such as how to present cases, write admission orders, sign-over patient information, etc. I also had the opportunity through this current Selective to conduct a literature review on Virtual Patient cases and pilot our first case, in order to help improve the quality of our cases.

A huge flurry of activity also occurs behind the scenes including obtaining funding for the project, getting in touch with Faculty Mentors to see how to best integrate our project with the UofT Medicine curriculum, and trying out different interfaces to find an efficient way to make our cases flow and include assessement from the start.

 Currently, we are focusing on case writing and prototyping our cases, and we are also waiting to hear back from funding sources. The next phase, hopefully, will involve finalizing our cases and presenting them to appropriate committees for assessment for educational use.

I have certainly learned a great deal through being involved in this project about communication and teamwork, leading and managing a student initiative, as well as the challenges of developing effective educational tools. Hopefully, everything will come to fruition and we will eventually have a neat series of Internal Medicine cases that will be helpful for students to come. 

Here are a few good resources that my team and I were looking at to whet your appetite for Virtual Patients:

NEJM Interactive Cases: http://www.nejm.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/multimedia/interactive-medical-case


-Jenny

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