Educational Resource Column Virtual Patients as Novel Teaching Tools in Psychiatry

Effective interviewing skills are an essential core compe-tency of psychiatric training, especially when eliciting sensitive clinical information from child and adolescent psychiatric patients. Since it is not always possible to in-terview patients with the full range of psychiatric disorders during training, simulations such as “standardized patients” (SPs), that is, actors hired to portray patients, are nearly universal in current medical education (1, 2), and have been used to evaluate trainees ’ skills with objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE) (3). Use of computer-generated “virtual human patients ” (VPs) is increasingly appealing as technology produces VPs that are consistent and realistic (4–7). A recent randomized trial found that both VPs and SPs produced equivalent improvements in diagnostic ability among nurses, physicians, psychologists, and public health workers (8), and the versatility of VPs makes them well suited to teach clinical reasoning skills (9). VPs can be pro-grammed to reflect a wide variety of clinical symptoms and behaviors useful in teaching trainees critical thinking and diagnostic acuity (9). VPs can also be utilized to eval-uate psychiatric residents ’ and medical students ’ clinical-management strategies. Both SPs and VPs offer a supervised practice for trainees before they encounter a challenging, live patient (e.g., pa-tients with trauma exposure, sexual assault/rape, physical attacks, and physical/sexual abuse); however, VPs, unlike SPs, are not limited by potential financial constraints to train actors (2). At present, there is little published data to guide the design and integration of VPs into psychiatric education; thus, research is needed (9). The potential benefits of VPs in medical education are the unlimited realistic simulations of patients of all ages and diverse ethnic and cultural character-istics to students, in a safe and reproducible manner (10). The objective of this pilot studywas to investigate the fea-sibility of interviewing a virtual adolescent patient (VP) with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and to increase trainees ’ and educators ’ awareness of this technology (5–7)