Using the CyberPatient™ platform to develop practical skills for international students

Abstract

Relevance: One of the first practical steps medical students can learn is conducting a medical interview. Virtual reality can provide students with a suitable virtual clinical environment for learning and practicing anamnesis collection skills using reliable, standardized, cost-effective online tools. In their meta-analysis, many researchers concluded that virtual patients effectively improve students’ clinical judgment ability on specific topics.
The study aimed to assess the impact of using the CyberPatient™ platform on improving the skills of collecting medical history from international students. It then identified improvements in the practical skills of prescribing and conducting diagnostic measures and practical prognostic diagnosis.
Materials and methods: To achieve this goal, the CyberPatient™ platform was used at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology as part of a practical lesson for students from abroad (group 02-19) in the specialty ‘General Medicine’ in the subject ‘Gynecology.’ The lesson topics were ‘Endometriosis,’ ‘Menopausal syndrome,’ and ‘Inflammatory diseases of the female genital organs.’ CyberPatient presents ready-made scenarios created on an online platform using specially animated avatars to simulate patients in real life.
Results: The high efficiency of CyberPatient™ technology is due to its ability to address didactic tasks effectively: it allows for creating an individual educational trajectory, taking into account different initial levels of student competence, visually presents educational information, and models a professional task. It also enables objective monitoring of learning results and quick feedback, identifies errors, and facilitates self-control and self-correction, thereby enhancing the motivational aspect of training. The scoring system encourages thoroughness and accuracy: students score 100 points for completing a stage independently without assistance. If, according to the assessment sheet, the student does not score the required score, scores less than 50 points, or does not pass one of the stages, he must re-pass the entire stage, indicating that he did not fulfill this criterion.
Conclusion: CyberPatient™ software is an effective teaching method that can be successfully used to develop clinical reasoning and clinical decision-making skills. Given the positive results, medical schools can widely use CyberPatient™ technologies in educational activities.
However, developing ways to integrate this simulation technology into existing training programs is necessary to obtain high-quality results.