Currently, the physician workforce is aging and average hours worked is falling compared to historical levels. In addition, the physician-to-population ratio is beginning to plateau, and is expected to decline right as the U.S. elderly (and more medically needy) population is on the rise. Thus, the physician workforce may not be able fulfill the U.S. population's demand. While medical school class size is on the rise, the amount of quality time medical students have to learn procedures has drawn concern from researchers. There are more medical students today than ever that require hands-on, in-depth training, yet face dwindling opportunities to get such an education. ArchieMD aims to answer this need by developing the Medical Student Trainer Platform, which combines realistic visual 3-D computer models, a manikin task trainer, and augmented reality devices to provide an effective platform for training medical student's key clinical skills. The technical objectives of this Phase II projet are to expand the technology to several new clinical tasks, as well as adding speech recognition capability. Once the new training modules have been developed, the expanded prototype will be evaluated during a pilot study comprising 136 medical students. The technology will be evaluated to determine its efficacy in improving confidence and knowledge based around those tasks.
This proposed project could benefit public health by providing a novel method for efficiently and effectively training medical student's key clinical skills, thus improving the knowledge and ability of our nation's future physician workforce.
