Development of a web based aboriginal virtual patient system for training medical students

Abstract

Virtual patient (VP) systems are interactive computer simulations of real-life clinical scenarios for the purpose of medical training, education and assessment. There are limitations with the existing foreign VP systems which make them unsuitable for training indigenous Nigerian medical students. In this study, an Aboriginal Virtual Patient (AVP) system was developed to train medical students. In order to ascertain the feasibility of this research, we validated the effectiveness of aboriginal virtual patient cases over life patient cases, the following metrics were used: accessibility, privacy, accuracy, security, availability and skill-acquired. Questionnaire, developed based on these metrics, was used to interview 80 medical students and 30 doctors from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso. A common generic web-based architecture was then developed for the creation, management and evaluation of web-based aboriginal virtual patient cases. In order to evaluate the performance of the developed Web AVP system over existing foreign Web-based VP system, the following performance measures were used: privacy, security, accessibility, user-friendliness, ease of use and efficiency. Forty five (45) medical students and 25 doctors from LAUTECH, Ogbomoso tested the developed Web AVP system and an existing Web-based VP (called Web SP). Results of the initial feasibility study show that medical learners and trainers considered VP more effective in acquiring clinical skills in all the measures used except for accuracy where real patients have higher rating than VP. Furthermore, the developed Web AVP system has higher performance when compared to Web SP in training Nigerian medical students. The developed system was found to be more suitable for training and assessing medical students; which can eliminate challenges that could arise from using foreign VP systems.