Ellaway Rachel, Poulton Terry, Fors Uno, McGee James B, Albright Susan
University of London, UK.
Med Teach. 2008;30(2):170-4. doi: 10.1080/01421590701874074.
Virtual patients as a form of educational intervention can take many forms and can provide highly effective ways of addressing reduced student access to real patients, the need for standardised and well-structured educational patient encounters, and opportunities for students to practice in safe and responsive environments. However, virtual patients can also be complicated and costly to develop. As a result collaborative and distributed development is best suited to their widespread take up. This paper considers the development and use of virtual patients and the steps that have been taken to support authors in making this approach more sustainable and adaptable. In particular, this has involved the development of a common data interoperability standard, which in turn has engaged a number of communities that have developed, or are developing, virtual patient commons, consisting of shared resources, tools and knowledge for mutual benefit. The paper illustrates how innovative and otherwise difficult to sustain models for supporting and extending healthcare education, such as virtual patients, can be supported using a commons approach with commonly agreed data standards and specifications at their core.
虚拟患者作为一种教育干预形式，可以有多种形式，并且能够提供非常有效的方式来解决学生接触真实患者机会减少的问题，满足对标准化且结构良好的教育性医患接触的需求，以及为学生提供在安全且响应式环境中进行实践的机会。然而，开发虚拟患者也可能复杂且成本高昂。因此，协作式和分布式开发最适合其广泛应用。本文探讨了虚拟患者的开发与使用，以及为支持作者使这种方法更具可持续性和适应性所采取的步骤。具体而言，这涉及到一个通用数据互操作性标准的制定，这反过来又促使了一些社区参与其中，这些社区已经或正在开发虚拟患者共享库，其包含共享资源、工具和知识以实现互利共赢。本文阐述了如何使用一种以通用认可的数据标准和规范为核心的共享库方法，来支持诸如虚拟患者这类创新且难以持续的支持和扩展医疗教育的模式。
