gms | German Medical Science

Although many good reasons are put forward to support the usefulness of virtual patients in medical education, currently their actual use and impact are modest at all levels of medical education, from undergraduate and postgraduate education to continuous professional development [2], [5]. However, this situation is set to change rapidly with lower costs of the technology to develop and apply VPs, the availability of technology standards to guarantee their interoperability, collaborative development and sharing of VP collections by consortia, acceptance of VPs as equivalent to real-life clinical experiences by accreditation agencies for medical schools and acceptance of the use of VPs for high stakes assessments.

Despite the obvious value of VPs, the increasing feasibility of broad application of VPs and the acceptance of VPs as an important educational tool by authoritative bodies, there is a paucity of information on how to design VPs for different educational scenarios and how to integrate them in medical education [1], [3]. Because the ultimate goal of medical education is to deliver highly competent professionals who will provide optimal health care we also need to prove that VP educational interventions has positive effects on physicians’ competencies as measured in the classroom, educational laboratory, and health care settings [4].

In this presentation the emphasis will be on the use of VPs in learning in different educational scenarios and the implications for design and integration of VPs in the curriculum.