gms | German Medical Science

Background: Clinical reasoning is based on the declarative and procedural knowledge of workflows in clinical medicine. Educational approaches like problem based learning or mannequin simulators support learning of procedural knowledge. Immersive patient simulators (IPS) go one step further as they allow an illusionary immersion into a synthetic world. Students can freely navigate an avatar through a 3D environment, interact with the virtual surrounding and treat virtual patients. By playful learning with IPS medical workflows can be repetitively trained and internalized. As there are only a few university- driven IPS with a profound amount of medical knowledge available, we developed an university based IPS framework. Our simulator is free to use and combines a high immersion grade with profound medical content. By adding disease specific content modules, simulator framework can be expanded depending on the curricular demands. However, new educational tools compete with the traditional teaching methods. It was our aim to develop an educational content module that teaches clinical and therapeutic workflows in surgical oncology. Furthermore we wanted to answer the question whether the use of this module can impair student performance.

Materials and methods: The new module was based on the declarative and procedural learning targets of the official German medical examination regulations. The module was added to our custom made IPS (ALICE: Artificial learning interface for clinical education). ALICE was evaluated on 62 3th year students.

Results: Students showed a high motivation when using the simulator as most of them had fun while using it. ALICE showed positive impact on clinical reasoning as there was a significant improvement in determining the correct therapy after using the simulator. ALICE positively influenced increase in declarative knowledge as there was an improvement in answering multiple choice questions before and after simulator use.

Conclusion: ALICE has positive effect on knowledge gain and raises students’ motivation. It is a suitable tool for supporting clinical education in the blended learning context.