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. 2013 Sep 8:13:103.
doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-13-103.

On the usage of health records for the design of Virtual Patients: a systematic review

Marcus D Bloice  1 , Klaus-Martin Simonic, Andreas Holzinger
Affiliations

On the usage of health records for the design of Virtual Patients: a systematic review

Marcus D Bloice et al. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. .

Abstract

Background: The process of creating and designing Virtual Patients for teaching students of medicine is an expensive and time-consuming task. In order to explore potential methods of mitigating these costs, our group began exploring the possibility of creating Virtual Patients based on electronic health records. This review assesses the usage of electronic health records in the creation of interactive Virtual Patients for teaching clinical decision-making.

Methods: The PubMed database was accessed programmatically to find papers relating to Virtual Patients. The returned citations were classified and the relevant full text articles were reviewed to find Virtual Patient systems that used electronic health records to create learning modalities.

Results: A total of n = 362 citations were found on PubMed and subsequently classified, of which n = 28 full-text articles were reviewed. Few articles used unformatted electronic health records other than patient CT or MRI scans. The use of patient data, extracted from electronic health records or otherwise, is widespread. The use of unformatted electronic health records in their raw form is less frequent. Patient data use is broad and spans several areas, such as teaching, training, 3D visualisation, and assessment.

Conclusions: Virtual Patients that are based on real patient data are widespread, yet the use of unformatted electronic health records, abundant in hospital information systems, is reported less often. The majority of teaching systems use reformatted patient data gathered from electronic health records, and do not use these electronic health records directly. Furthermore, many systems were found that used patient data in the form of CT or MRI scans. Much potential research exists regarding the use of unformatted electronic health records for the creation of Virtual Patients.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Abstract dlowchart. The procedure followed during the abstract and manuscript reviewing process.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of article types. The suitable abstracts were distributed as follows: 113 (≈40%) citations were tagged as being software systems, 17 (≈6%) were tagged as being hardware only systems, 75 (≈27%) were tagged as being models of some kind, such as bio-simulations, and 74 (≈27%) were reports including reviews and papers on 3rd party system adoption.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distribution of teaching types. The distribution of the teaching types.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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