AN INVITATION TO MEDICAL SCHOOLS AND MEDICAL EDUCATORS
- Have you ever wondered why a passenger seat on a commercial aircraft is
statistically the safest place in the world ?
- Have you ever thought what may be the reasons some medical doctors become
so much more efficient, trustworthy and elegant in their practice than
others ?
- Do you feel concerned about the staggering costs of healthcare and do you
think there may be a way to reduce these costs and improve quality of care
at the same time ?
- Do you believe that education must undergo fundamental changes in the age
of Internet and that passive learning is a thing of the past ?
If you answered YYYY, read-on :-)
I work with a Geneva-based physician, expert in medical education. I am an
Internet medical webmaster, also based in Geneva, Switzerland.
We are co-authors of the VIPS project: www.swissvips.ch . VIPS stands for
Virtual Internet Patient Simulation. VIPS is a simulator of clinical cases
in ambulatory medicine. Its mission is to teach clinical reasoning by
exposing the user to potential errors during a simulated consultation. VIPS
does for physicians what flight simulators do for pilots ( pilots have the
best CE !). It even delivers on line CME certificates.
Vips is a complete medical e-learning system available as Academic release
1.0. We're working hard on the v 2.0.
We believe that VIPS may directly profit medical education in your country.
WHY?
Well, we are currently generating a database of standardized clinical cases
that Internet/Intranet users (students, physicians) can access through our
custom browser during simulated consultations. This may complement and even
replace standardized patients in use today and automate medical e-learning
and e-testing..
OUR PROPOSAL TO MED SCHOOLS:
We are seeking to populate our database with VIPS cases.
We would like to offer you the opportunity to "incarnate" one of your own
standardized patient scenarios as a VIPS case with exclusive access by your
institution. You may use this case to benchmark it as a teaching tool
relative to the existing solutions (live standardized patients), train and
test students, etc.
If you wish to become the owner of your own VIPS case, we invite you to send
us a standardized patient case blueprint and we will do the necessary
programming tasks to generate a virtual standardized patient. Your VIPS
case will be available as a flat file on a diskette or on the web.
OUR PROPOSAL TO INDIVIDUALS:
A key feature sets VIPS apart from other simulators: the rapid creation of
new clinical cases by an unlimited number of authors.
This means that your colleagues and yourself may wish to become authors of
cases.
Authors are rewarded by royalties they receive each time their case is used
to sell a CME certificate.
VIPS is a highly collaborative project and we invite you to join the growing
team of VIPS community members.
We are seeking franchised partners that will build their own virtual
communities. The possibilities are many: remote education (rural areas),
third world e-teaching, HMOs, MCOs, etc. Both non-profit and for profit
partnerships are sought.
We believe all in all that VIPS significantly contributes to the great
paradigm shift in medical education.
We invite you to become a key player in this process.
To learn more: http://www.swissvips.ch
or e-mail to: vloroch at mcnet.ch
Kind regards,
Vanya Loroch, Ph. D.
VIPS Internet Operating Officer
La Mottaz-Vy
1186 Châtel-sur-Rolle
Tél. +41 21 826 14 78
Fax +41 21 826 14 79
