Key benefits

• VIPS sets a standard of excellency in Computer-assisted Medical Education

It is widely recognized that medical colleges and societies need to improve their educational competence to be able to deliver high quality continuing medical education. Regulatory tightening is under way to select effective educational tools for CME and discard the rest. VIPS, as a highly advanced computer-based simulator that trains and evaluates clinical reasoning, meets the highest standards of adult learning theory.

• VIPS automatically generates case completion certificates and user profiles.

Because each Virtual Interactive Patient can be easily programmed to challenge the user with any set of learning or testing objectives, VIPS represents a sophisticated automated profiling tool.
The VIPS session trace provides a complete view of the user's reasoning pathway to solve a given problem. At the same time, VIPS delivers certificates of completion based on any number of criteria.

• VIPS is the electronic counterpart of Standardized Patients

Standardized patients are a widely used, highly effective but costly system of educating and testing medical students. VIPS can achieve objectives similar to that of standardized patients at a fraction of the cost.

• VIPS contributes to reduction in global healthcare costs

VIPS trains experts on how to avoid asking unnecessary questions and how to avoid ordering unnecessary procedures. It thus trains them how to save time and money. In a Geneva-based physician network service that incorporates VIPS methodology, global savings to over 12,000 insurees after a three year period amounted to an average of 40%. A 15% reduction is directly attributable to a VIPS-like continuing education scheme.

• VIPS allows worldwide exposure to a variety of cases benefiting both wealthy and underprivileged countries.

Thanks to VIPS' unique database architecture of case contents, Virtual Interactive Patients can be efficiently developed to reach any learning objective in any language for any particular target audience. Thus, the system makes it economically feasible to develop cases not only for highly trained and wealthy specialists in top-rated western hospitals but also for public health workers dispensing basic critical care in poor, underdeveloped countries.

• VIPS complements any other type of medical education

VIPS does not displace existing systems of adult education: conferences, workshops, written materials, other simulators, etc. Rather it complements them by introducing a component that is generally missing in most educational offerings: decision analysis in the context of uncertainty.

If it is important for a professional to know how to ask exclusively the right questions and make only the right decisions when faced with a problem with many unknowns, VIPS is the perfect system to achieve professional excellence.