Using virtual worlds for educating people in the medical field

Role-playing doctor inside Second Life?

Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London has developed a region in Second Life that aims to design game-based learning activities for delivery of virtual patients that can drive experiential, diagnostic, and role-play learning activities supporting patients’ diagnoses, investigations and treatment.

One of my Twitter friends, Andrea Vascellari, thinks this is a “terrific example that demonstrates the value of virtual worlds like Second Life” and is interested in other folk’s thoughts after watching this video:

Good to hear a lot of uses of “washed my hands.” 

Andrew, this video reminded me of the May 2007 VTOR post: An opportunity to try virtual knee surgery where I wrote:

The other day I learned about a social networking site for doctors to discuss difficult cases with other doctors called Sermo. 15,000+ doctors are signed up. They don’t have any virtual reality going on there, but it would be interesting to see a virtual component of some sort if or how it could work.

I just checked back on the status of Sermo and see the number of physicians signed up has grown to 70,000+. A 55,000 physican increase over 15 months, impressive. Clearly interest among doctors sharing information on patients with each other and to quote the Sermo website: “exchange clinical insights, observations, and review cases in real time — all the time.”

While case details can be exchanged textually probably faster than bumping around in SL, I still see value in using a virtual world to play out what-if scenarios with patients and for training. I’m not sure how much I’d rely on Second Life as the go to platform with so many other choices these days. Perhaps something in a browser would be better. I wonder if Sermo has thought about integrating something like this with their site.