Licensing opportunity
Stephen Chapman and Luke Bracegirdle from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Keele in Staffordshire, UK, are looking to license their proprietary IT system that generates computer characters, such as virtual patients/doctors, which pharmacists in training can interact with, so improving their communication and decision-making skills.
The technology is currently geared towards simulations of conditions such as dyspepsia and hypertension, but can also be tailored to assist study and training in a variety of areas, as stated by Luke Bracegirdle, responsible for the technical design and future development. Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has acquired non-exclusive rights to the virtual patient technology that will be used for their undergraduate pharmacy programme.
Using this system, the learner communicates with a virtual patient through voice recognition or by typing questions into a standard computer interface. Responses are verbal or through gestures that indicate emotions such as pain, stress or anxiety. The system also provides the learner with feedback from the patient on their performance. A virtual doctor has also been developed to assist pharmaceutical sales representatives.
Chapman, of Keele’s School of Pharmacy, said: “Training students to carry out one-to-one interviews is very resource-intensive as you need to get people to role-play the part of a patient or doctor. It is also difficult to standardise the process so that the students all get the same experience. Using the Virtual Patient allows us to explore the full patient consultation and to let the student learn from mistakes in a safe environment that would not be possible in real life. For example, the Patient can be programmed to be allergic to penicillin and can suffer anaphylactic shock if the student forgets to check. It really hard-wires the learning into the brain in a way that is not possible with textbooks alone.”
http://www.keele.ac.uk/schools/pharm/vp/
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