HSOP Trio Wins Innovative Teaching Award
COPYRIGHT©2003 AUHSOP
posted June 15, 2005
hree
members of the Department of Pharmacy Care Systems, Dr. William Villaume
(right), Dr. Bruce Berger (center), and graduate
student Brad Barker (left), recently won one of three Innovations
in Teaching Awards from
AACP. Their work focused on a class assignment designed to help first
year students master Motivational Interviewing in counseling patients.
Basically students wrote a script for counseling a Virtual Patient that
was developed by the team. The Department members will present their
findings at the AACP meeting in Cincinnati, OH from July 9 – 13, 2005.
The Virtual Patient software program allows students to talk with a patient who appears on a computer screen in pre-recorded digital video. Once the patient has said something, the program displays 2-5 possible responses that the student can say or paraphrase. The computer uses speech recognition to figure out which response was said and then plays the video of the patient's next comment. Because the lag time is only one to two seconds, speaking with the virtual patient has the feel of spoken interaction with a real person. What the patient says next is really determined by what the student pharmacist has just said. So the virtual patient program is run by a script that specifies numerous paths that the interaction can follow.
In their class assignment, P1 students were asked to write a script for a virtual patient with an assigned illness such as diabetes, asthma, arthritis, etc. Their interactive scripts had to allow for both traditional and motivational interviewing responses to the virtual patient. In the course of writing their scripts, students systematically focused on how Motivational Interviewing deals more productively with resistance and noncompliance in a patient than does traditional biomedical counseling. Because the script writing assignment relieved the students of the face to face pressure of interacting with a real patient, students were able to think through how to word their responses based on Motivational Interviewing. Data from the final exam in the course indicated that the students had achieved more active mastery of Motivational Interviewing than if they had just heard lectures and read material about Motivational Interviewing.
Drs. Berger and Villaume are currently writing scripts and producing video so that the incoming P1s will actually be able use virtual patients to practice their motivational interviewing in real time. This is a project being funded by Pfizer, Inc. They also envision using virtual patients in the case studies during modules. Student pharmacists would have to interview a virtual patient for pertinent information in order to make a diagnosis and then would have to counsel the virtual patient about implementing the treatment plan. Using this innovative teaching process, communication is more than a supplemental skill taught on the side. Rather, it becomes an integral aspect of each case study.
One great challenge in teaching is to use technology to create more dynamic and realistic learning environments that require the student to actively explore material and reach their own conclusions. The three designers of the Virtual Patient software are enthusiastic about the increased efficiency and effectiveness that can be achieved through the appropriate integration of this supporting technology for the student, teacher, and practitioner. With rapid improvements in speech recognition and speech synthesis that are anticipated over the next decade, the use of Virtual Patients should become a widely utilized tool in pharmacy education.
It has recently been announced that the PSC team has received a $150,000 research contract from Pfizer to develop their innovative teaching technology program called the "Virtual Patient."