The Virtual Patient - a common standard for medical simulations

The Virtual Patient specification was developed to take advantage of the natural affinity for the branching narrative style of much of medical education. The Virtual Patient is a common standard by which patient cases can be structured in a manner that can be read by many game and simulation systems.

A virtual patient represents whichever characteristics of the patient are relevant to the current educational context.

The VP format contains these segments:

• Patient History
• Investigations
• Differential Diagnosis
• Final Diagnosis

This is specified using a standardized document structure for the description of the patient called CaseML .

What software can utilize Virtual Patients? 

The Labyrinth system, developed at University of Edinburgh is one example of an elegant use of the standard without attempting high fidelity realism.

The Labyrinth system uses mostly text-based interaction, along with beeper windows, test results and various other messages and alerts that pop up to provide a realistic experience (See below).

Moving up the realism scale a little, is this first phase of a project from the Imperial College of Medicine.