Authoring, deploying, and managing dynamic Virtual Patients in Virtual Clinical Environments
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LeRoy Heinrichs
Abstract
Following their introduction at the beginning of the 21st century, interactive or dynamic Virtual Patients are beginning to be used more widely in clinical education. They can be seen as being at the end of a continuum of simulation technical complexity, having been earlier developed on a wide range of “media”: human actors, paper, video, physical mannequins, etc. This paper focuses on the current emergent more complex Virtual Patients in three-dimensional (3D) immersive clinical environments. In these environments, in silico 3D patient avatars interact directly in response to virtual clinical interventions undertaken by avatars, each of which is controlled by one or more users. The paper explores the issues of authoring, deploying, and managing these real-time, dynamic Virtual Patients using as an example the immersive clinical environment CliniSpace. As clinician-accessible Virtual Patient authoring is now becoming available in immersive clinical environments, so these wider clinical and managerial non-technical issues are coming rapidly to the fore.
Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organisation(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
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©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Breaking down barriers to medical e-learning
- Reviews
- Authoring, deploying, and managing dynamic Virtual Patients in Virtual Clinical Environments
- Building an audio/video-feedback system for simulation training in medical education
- Research Articles
- Development and evaluation of a virtual patient-based exam in occupational medicine
- E-learning innovations for the education of general practitioners at the Bavarian Virtual University (BVU) – a model for other countries
- Evaluation of three educational use cases for using Virtual Patients in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): a Delphi study
- Creation of an iBook aimed at medical students – a student’s perspective
- Congress Abstracts
- International Conference Cybernetic Modelling of Biological Systems MCSB 2015
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Breaking down barriers to medical e-learning
- Reviews
- Authoring, deploying, and managing dynamic Virtual Patients in Virtual Clinical Environments
- Building an audio/video-feedback system for simulation training in medical education
- Research Articles
- Development and evaluation of a virtual patient-based exam in occupational medicine
- E-learning innovations for the education of general practitioners at the Bavarian Virtual University (BVU) – a model for other countries
- Evaluation of three educational use cases for using Virtual Patients in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): a Delphi study
- Creation of an iBook aimed at medical students – a student’s perspective
- Congress Abstracts
- International Conference Cybernetic Modelling of Biological Systems MCSB 2015
