May 4, 2012 8:00 AM – 9:30am
Jonathan Round MD, St George's University of London
Luke Woodham, BS, St George's University of London
Terrence Poulton, MD, St George's University of London
Background Virtual patients (VPs) have been integrated into courses, problem based learning and exams. They are shown to enhance learning and are popular with students and teachers. With the ubiquity of smartphones, students, trainees and doctors can now access medical information easily and at the point of care. Aim To develop a virtual patient player on the iPhone and populate it with a suite of related patients. To evaluate its usability. Interventions Working with a professional iPhone software developer, we developed an app to play VPs on the iPhone. We produced a tool to convert VPs from ‘decisionsimulation’ to code suitable for iPhone download. We created a suite of paediatric cases, of which 10 were adapted from existing cases and 10 were newly written. These could be downloaded to the iPhone for offline use. We surveyed trial users to learn about the use of the app. Findings Initially there were substantial problems reliably converting branched cases into code for the iPhone, especially around branch points. This required rewriting the conversion programme. The cases were easy to download, being typically under 1MB without images. The app played intuitively (figure), although some users found that the text was too small to read comfortably. Users enjoyed being able to play the cases in unusual contexts, such as the underground, and that the learning derived was similar to that with online cases.
