JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Virtual patient software can be a useful tool to foster the development of medical history taking skills without the bedside setting’s inherent constraints. While virtual patients (VP) hold the promise of contributing to the development of students’ skills, documenting and assessing skills acquired through VP remains a challenge.

Objective:

We propose outcome measures for medical history taking, articulate their implementation within a VP and then test the measures by comparing VP scores to the judgement of 10 clinician-educators (CE).

Methods:

We built, in the virtual patient software, four domains of medical history taking to be assessed (Breadth, Depth, Logical Sequence and Interviewing Technique). Ten CE watched the screen recordings of three students to assess performance first globally then for each of the four domains for the three students.

Results:

The scores provided by the VP were slightly higher but comparable to the ones given by the CE for the global performance and for Depth, Logical Sequence and interviewing technique. For Breadth, the VP scores were higher for two of the three students compared to the CE scores.

Conclusions:

Findings suggest that the VP assessment gives results akin to those that would be generated by CE. Developing a model for what constitutes a good history taking performance in specific contexts may provide insight about how CEs generally think about assessment.