Making Diagnostic Decisions Count: Design and Development of a Virtual Patient Environment for Fostering Medical Education

Virtual patients (VPs) are found to be efficient tools for building diagnostic competence and clinical reasoning in medical students. Here, we present an approach that includes additional game elements, namely counters that keep track of various costs of the diagnostic decisions. The initial pilot studies show unanimous acceptance of the platform as a learning tool among medical students with varying degrees of prior knowledge. In qualitative interviews, students refer to the counters as “good reflection,” “increasing the feeling of responsibility” and evaluated it as an incentive for intense group discussion. This has shown to be helpful in designing instructional tools to foster medical education, also allowing medicine instructors to create their own VP environments and patient cases, tune the respective instructional design, and launch VPs for specific learning purposes.