Abstract
BackgroundThe process of creating and designing Virtual Patients for teaching students of medicine is an expensive and time-consuming task. In order to explore potential methods of mitigating these costs, our group began exploring the possibility of creating Virtual Patients based on electronic health records. This review assesses the usage of electronic health records in the creation of interactive Virtual Patients for teaching clinical decision-making.MethodsThe PubMed database was accessed programmatically to find papers relating to Virtual Patients. The returned citations were classified and the relevant full text articles were reviewed to find Virtual Patient systems that used electronic health records to create learning modalities.ResultsA total of n = 362 citations were found on PubMed and subsequently classified, of which n = 28 full-text articles were reviewed. Few articles used unformatted electronic health records other than patient CT or MRI scans. The use of patient data, extracted from electronic health records or otherwise, is widespread. The use of unformatted electronic health records in their raw form is less frequent. Patient data use is broad and spans several areas, such as teaching, training, 3D visualisation, and assessment.ConclusionsVirtual Patients that are based on real patient data are widespread, yet the use of unformatted electronic health records, abundant in hospital information systems, is reported less often. The majority of teaching systems use reformatted patient data gathered from electronic health records, and do not use these electronic health records directly. Furthermore, many systems were found that used patient data in the form of CT or MRI scans. Much potential research exists regarding the use of unformatted electronic health records for the creation of Virtual Patients.
Highlights
The process of creating and designing Virtual Patients for teaching students of medicine is an expensive and time-consuming task
This paper discusses unformatted electronic patient records which we describe as patient records which have been retrieved from a hospital information system in their raw form
Many Virtual Patients are based on patient data, yet often they do not use electronic health records in their raw form; rather, data are extracted from these records and reformatted for use in a Virtual Patient user interface
Summary
The process of creating and designing Virtual Patients for teaching students of medicine is an expensive and time-consuming task. Much research has shown that Virtual Patients are a credible and effective form of teaching, and they have been shown to improve knowledge retention, student participation, and other factors [1,2] They are expensive and time consuming to produce, resulting in lower adoption rates than might be expected [3]. This paper discusses unformatted electronic patient records which we describe as patient records which have been retrieved from a hospital information system in their raw form. These could be lab reports, medical examination reports, X-Rays, electrocardiograms (ECGs), and so on. Many Virtual Patients are based on patient data, yet often they do not use electronic health records in their raw form; rather, data are extracted from these records and reformatted for use in a Virtual Patient user interface
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