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Abstract Title

Virtual Patients - how close to reality are they?

Hege Inga
Marcel Urrestri
Daniel Tolks
Claudia Kiessling

8II Mobile learning

Institute for Medical Education, LMU Munich

Background

Virtual Patients (VPs) are:

Suitable to teach clinical reasoning skills
Often well designed in terms of didactical, technical and content-related aspects.
As realistic and interactive as possible, e.g. by including videos and questions

Situation at LMU Munich:

71 VPs in internal medicine/surgery are integrated into the medical curriculum at LMU Munich.
VPs deepen and complement face-to-face courses
Most VPs are NOT based on real patient stories

Figure 1: Example card of VP in CASUS^® (click for full size)

Summary of Results

Over-representation of German academic VPs, no refugees, no unemployed VPs (see Details)
Elderly VPs underrepresented, "strange" peak at age 35-39 (see Figure 1 in details)
Data often not entered by VP authors (e.g. BMI, smoking, Handicap, Pre-medication)

	Common diseases in Germany	VP Main diagnosis	VP Medical history
1.	Cardiovascular Diseases	Injuries, Intoxication	Cardiovascular Diseases
2.	Injuries, Intoxications	Cardiovascular Diseases	Endocrinal & Metabolic Diseases
3.	Gastro-intestinal Diseases	Neoplasms	Gastro-intestinal Diseases
4.	Neoplasms	Gastro-intestinal & Pulmonary Diseases	Pulmonary Diseases

Table 1: Most common diseases in Germany in comparison to diseases covered in VPs

Summary of Work

Pilotstudy:
We analyzed the 71 VPs integrated into the internal medicine/surgery curriculum at LMU Munich concerning the following aspects:

These data were compared to statistical data of the German population¹

Conclusion

Conclusions from this Pilot study:

Difficult to get reliable data about patients in Germany.
More guidance for authors necessary, to include basic data (e.g. BMI, pre-medication,...).
Revise VPs based on the results.

Outlook:

Main study on VPs in an European context planned
Include additional data related to patient perspective and communication (based on Kenny et al.)
Further investigate influence of creation process

References

www.gbe-bund.de (data from 2012)
Kenny NP, Beagan BL (2004). The patient as text: a challenge for problem-based learning. Med Educ 38:1071-9