Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will take place in DC 3317 and online.
Aakanksha Khandwaha, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Edith Law
Effective communication skills are an integral part of the physician-patient relationship, aiding in patient autonomy, trust, and comprehension. Thus, there is an increased effort directed towards developing clinical communication skills in medical education. In medical school, students interact with human actors trained to reproduce a patient scenario known as standardized patients (SPs), who are essential for the development of clinical competency skills. However, recruiting SP actors can be difficult, and students tend to have limited interactions with them (i.e., during weekly classes or final examination). Thus, there is an increased effort in developing virtual patient (VP) technologies for medical education. Despite this, developers rarely draw inspiration from established SP programs to inform the design of these learning technologies.
In this work, we attempt to bridge this gap by conducting a semi-structured interview study with 23 stakeholders involved with the SP program at our partner institution, including SP actors, preceptors, trainers, and case writers, to understand the current structure of their program, the challenges and barriers they face, and their perceptions of virtual patient learning technologies. Based on these findings, we propose 5 design guidelines that we believe should inform future development of VP technologies such that they complement, rather than replace, the SP program.
To address the challenges and barriers in the current SP program, we propose a VP Ecosystem consisting of (1) the Patient Case Co-Creation tool, which helps case writers develop cases with a greater variation of technical and non-technical diversity, and (2) Patient Simulacra, an LLM-driven simulated patient system that gives medical students more time with (virtual) patients to enhance their experiential learning.
We further develop and implement the Patient Simulacra system, based on our proposed design guidelines, which consists of (1) the patient agent, which simulates a patient scenario and gives feedback to the user, and (2) MEDucator, an educational agent that provides helpful suggestions during a scenario and feedback to the user afterwards. Our work highlights the importance of involving multiple stakeholders (i.e., medical educators and SPs, not just medical students) to inform the design and development of VP technologies.
To attend this master’s thesis presentation in person, please go to DC 3317. You can also attend virtually on Zoom.