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TheraSim Team at HIMSS 2012

The 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference and Exhibition is off to a fast start! Some of the TheraSim team is in Las Vegas showcasing our virtual patient simulation software and with 35,000+ healthcare IT and management systems professionals in attendance, the booth has been filled with attendees demoing our super smart simulation platform.

The exhibition hall will be open through Thursday evening at 6:00 pm PT. So if you are around, stop by booth #14153 to visit with us. In addition to learning more about how virtual patient simulation can help improve clinical decision making by healthcare professionals, you can also sample our colorful candy bar – yum!

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas for the show, follow @HIMSS, @TheraSimVPS and the #HIMSS12 tag on Twitter to keep up with all the action at HIMSS 2012.

To learn more about TheraSim, visit us at booth #14153, go to our website at http://www.therasim.com, call us at +1 919.226.3299 or email us at sales@therasim.com.

ELearning has expanded the reach of education – reducing the strain on educational resources and creating content with a longer life cycle. Simulation offers the same strengths that eLearning provides and brings the experience closer to reality. By coupling artificial intelligence and mentoring, TheraSim offers a simulation platform that is hitting healthcare from all angles.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my ninth in a series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 2 – Simulation Metrics – Can You Measure or Predict the Outcome?

Practice makes perfect, right? We can measure everything we do, right? Of course, the answer is no to both.  We strive for perfection and we can’t measure every step we take in clinical practice. We can document the steps we take, pause, reflect, correct if needed and forge ahead. We can operate under the microscope of supervision with checks and balances to improve the quality of healthcare and better patient outcomes.

Our training for healthcare professionals should be able to measure all the key decisions and actions to assess the path taken and the resulting outcome.  The challenge is does your training even capture the key decisions? The near universal answer is no. How could it? Traditional e-learning presents information plus maybe a new scenario based on the information presented and then tests the user with a multiple choice test. The only action that is captured is the choice. It’s simply a linear experience resulting in a correct or incorrect response.

The key to improving the effect of training on outcomes is the metrics the training solution can provide. Virtual patient simulation provides robust, granular measurement of all the choices a user makes during the simulation experience. Virtual patient simulation engages the user to make choices on the path, not just simply walk all the way down the path and then make a choice. VPS is more dynamic. A typical VPS scenario presents a patient, an environment and a scenario. The user needs to interact with all three by obtaining information, cognitively process that information and take action from a rich variety of lifelike choices. Non-simulation training can’t do this and traditional medical simulation can’t capture the granular choices because they are not captured. Interactive web-based software does this all of this.

The metrics then tell the story. Were the right choices made or not? The VPS Metrics report shows what combination of information was presented leading to definitive choices (or absence of choice) and what the result was.

The connection to outcomes is in the decision of the virtual patient simulation scenario. The market leaders in VPS can create scenarios with automated feedback through artificial intelligence engines that provide the training and guide the user. This “mode” is often called the “mentor mode”.  But the key to understanding the impact on actual patient outcomes is control for a group of users or the same users with a new scenario in “testing mode”.  Testing mode is the simulation with no mentoring, closely resembling clinical experience. There is no guidance and a new set of metrics is produced.  You now have a before and after data set.

The leading VPS Metrics solutions compare the results to see what the impact would have been before and after training. The result -> predictive behavior to measure the outcome.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my eighth in a series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 3 – Experiential Learning – It’s All About the Experience for Your User

Mr. David A. Kolb, a well-known educational theorist, helped popularize the idea of experiential learning. Experiential learning is based on an active experience combined with the opportunity to reflect, a direct contrast to rote learning and the pure didactic material thrown at us in much of our academic experience.

All simulation provides the components of experiential learning: opportunity for experience and reflection learn from setting a goal for prior to the experience, to deciding what should be performed, then taking that action, understanding the result, and finally understanding the actions to take next time.

Virtual patient simulation (VPS) is a fantastic method to create an experiential learning model for students beginning to master medical skills and for professionals looking refreshers or continuing education.  VPS has an artificial intelligence basis and provides mentoring throughout the experience to create constant opportunities for the continuum of experience-reflection-experience-reflection-future action. Traditional didactic learning and e-learning delivery models can’t provide what more sophisticated technology can. The top notch VPS architecture will provide thousands of legitimate feedback opportunities aimed at the reflection component of an experiential learning design.

As you begin to dig deeper into creating an experiential learning strategy for your simulation center or medical simulation programs, take a look at virtual patient simulation technology as a great way to challenge your users and create a better learning environment.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my seventh in a series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 4 – Realism – Keep it Real

The key to effective simulation training is realism. There is no substitute for in person clinical experience with humans but creating a realistic interaction during training can be done. Virtual patient simulation is a good substitute for certain clinical medical training and a great compliment for medical simulation.

With virtual patient simulation there is no need to suspend disbelief as you must with a manikin-based medical simulation. Psychologically you have to take the manikin seriously, your job is on the line and you need to perform but you really need to take you mind to a different place. In order to do this, the student or professional must suspend disbelief to varying extent.

As with clinical experience there is no substitute for certain manikin-based simulation but I urge all simulation center and healthcare simulation educators and administrators to consider and evaluate a web-based virtual patient to augment and complement existing simulation offerings.

Virtual patient simulation offers real human actors posing as believable patients to treat a variety of disease and therapeutic conditions including COPD, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis, and depression just to name a few. The best virtual patient solutions on the market allow for the user to interact with the videography, ask virtual questions, get responses, and receive automated mentor feedback based on the choice and the patient response.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my sixth entry in the series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 5 – Consistent Replication – BUT not just the One-to-Many Model

There is a lot of e-learning medical training out there these days and these solutions do a good job of standardizing a scalable computer based learning tool but they have limitations in that the methodology is listen, read, test, rinse and repeat until you get it right. It’s consistent, standardized and easily replicated but it is not simulation. E-learning modules and platforms create a great one to many consistent training solutions. But the “one-to-many” model in this case is “same-to-many”.  In practice, very few clinical situations are the same for everyone.

A “same-to-many” methodology doesn’t allow for human decision making and critical thinking that clinical practice demands. There isn’t always one right answer or one right way.

In virtual patient simulation, each user experience path can be different – hundreds if not thousands of legitimate permutations within a robust virtual patient simulation training and assessment experience. Throw in a few simulation curve balls and the number of unique simulation permutations can number in the tens of thousands – no limits, depending on the educational design you want.

The key differentiators for virtual patient simulation solutions compared to e-learning and even high-fidelity simulators center on consistency, standardization, replication and most importantly, what can be called standardized “infinite to many” model. Simulation goes beyond “one-to-many” in e-learning. Virtual patient simulation goes beyond your typical medical simulation.

Where e-learning and typical medical simulation fall short is in the artificial intelligence. An automated and intelligent simulation mentor can be quickly taught new things on demand and works 24×7. A virtual patient simulation platform should have a sophisticated automated and intelligent mentor that never fails, never calls in sick, and never has something else to do.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my fifth entry in the series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 6 – Patient Centric – Literally and Literally

Virtual patient simulation isn’t just a great way to augment training and simulation strategy, it can truly be the patient advocate.  The name says it all – patient simulation – but patient-based simulation offers many intangible advantages for the customer, which believe it or not, is the patient.

• The combination of virtual patient simulation advantages serves the patient’s best interest by providing a more comprehensively trained professional at the patient’s side.
• The VPS trained healthcare worker can better serve the patient since they have experienced more uncommon clinical scenarios through VPS training for scenarios that may have never presented during clinical experience.

Think of the often used analogy for Captain C.B. Sullenberger (“Sully”) who successfully landed an Airbus 320 in the Hudson River, saving 155 lives. Captain Sully had never been presented that scenario in real life, nor has anyone else for that matter, but he did have accumulated simulation training and experience that prepared him for that fateful flight.

The same can be said for simulating the rare but critical patient scenario and it can only be done cost effectively with a VPS solution. Plus, your patients will be thankful, even if they don’t actually thank you.

This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a virtual patient simulation company, following up with my fourth entry in the series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 7 – Carefree Maintenance – No Downtime!

Software has moved to the web for many reasons – the variety of applications, the availability of applications, the reliability of applications. Your medical simulation strategy should incorporate the same strategy as your IT department’s reason for moving to software as a service (SaaS) IT infrastructure.

When your simulation equipment breaks you are stuck, sometimes for days, but not so with virtual patient simulation. With an enterprise quality VPS system you won’t experience downtime challenges. Plus, scheduling is never an issue, since virtual simulation training is available from any internet connected device.

Your virtual patient simulation provider should be able to guarantee no downtime. When was the last time your simulation center or institution received a guarantee?

January 10, 2012 – This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a Virtual Patient Simulation company, following up with my third entry in a series.

As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 8 – Go beyond psychomotor simulation

Today’s Top 10 Reason is short and sweet. High fidelity manikins do a great job risk-free simulation for the critical psychomotor skills like intubation, sutures, injection, etc… Virtual patient simulation compliments these important skills by creating an interactive patient in virtual clinical settings.

A comprehensive web-based virtual patient simulation gives you immediate on-demand access to real life scenarios that monitor patient rapport, score inter-professional communication as well as visually represent patient emotion. It is a great complement to the core skill training that the manikin based simulators offer. Incorporating high quality video based standard patients on top of an automated artificial intelligence engine can help simulate some of the more difficult communication skills that healthcare professionals need training on.

Combine this with a wealth of automated mentoring and up to date medical reference and your simulation training strategy will be more meaningful and complete. It is essential that educators and instructors enhance their simulation strategy with simulation that addresses a broader range of realistic clinical interaction.

January 6, 2012 – This is Gordon Cervenka, President of TheraSim, a Virtual Patient Simulation company, following up with my second in a series.
As we ring in 2012 please follow my web log: 10 Reasons to Incorporate Virtual Simulation into your patient simulation offering.

Reason 9 – Flexibility – Virtual Patient Simulation offers Patient Variety and Rapid Deployment

There are many challenges in medical education. Two particular challenges can be aided by incorporating virtual patient simulation.

One challenge is the amount of change in medical education. The traditional model of medical education is basically three “Stages”, if you will: Stage 1 – read, Stage 2 – watch, Stage 3 – do. Stage 3 is first under supervision and then independent. The model is a classic apprenticeship model. The amount of change in medical education is initially a Stage 1 challenge that impacts Stage 2 and Stage 3.

Initial education frequently begins with print literature as curriculum standards dictate this approach. Some print literature makes it way online and into simple e-learning accessible online. It is no secret that mountains of medical literature is updated every week and it is extremely challenging to keep up with it and it is even more challenging to integrate these changes into education and training. It is nearly impossible to quickly integrate changes into standard simulation. Virtual patient simulation does not face this challenge. Within hours, a virtual patient simulation case or scenario can be updated, corrected or improved to reflect changes. This includes all the artificial intelligence rules, updated automated mentoring and reference material. Traditional high fidelity simulation simply does not support such a dynamic and rapid deployment model. Going further, within a week a completely new simulation case or scenario can be created AND distributed over the web. This is simply not possible with other simulation solutions.

The more compelling challenge that should be discussed centers on patient variety for clinical practice in Stage 2 and Stage 3. In the typical apprenticeship model, the breadth of learning is dependent on the patients that walk through the door. Healthcare providers need exposure to all types of patients and clinical practice can’t always provide that. The good news is that the governing bodies for education are beginning to increase the number of acceptable simulation hours as part of clinical practice requirements. The bad news with this is that these simulation experiences don’t address patient and clinical variety. High fidelity and manikin based simulations aren’t flexible enough to address the important but rare patient conditions. In defense of these simulation models, it is not economical to offer critical but rare conditions, which is an advantage of virtual patient simulation.

A quality virtual patient simulation offering will allow rapid development and deployment of limitless patient case and scenarios to ensure that your students and professionals are ready to deal with important but uncommon situations. You don’t have to wait for real life in clinic experience to conduct effective training, education and assessment for uncommon patient scenarios.