Outline

The Clinical Decision Making system is a full-featured software offering interactive patient cases and powerful scoring tools for teaching and evaluating learners' clinical reasoning skills.

With multiple case training modes, it focuses on the overall thinking process, emphasizes the intensive training of students for their basic skills in hypothesis development, diagnosis and treatment and also examines students' ability to deal with patients in different situations.

The system, containing settings of different difficulties with all cases collected from real patient data, is ideal for use to train tomorrow's clinicians.

Skills Gained

· Clinician/patient communication skills

· Physical exams and interpret findings

· Order pertinent lab tests, review findings, interpret imaging studies

· Clinical decision-making skills

· Common and rare cases familiarity

Features

System Components

1)  The system consists of three parts: instructor unit software, learner unit software and user management software.

2)  Instructor unit software has a variety of management functions, including case editing, training and assessment setup, result statistics and analysis, personnel assessment management etc.

3)  Learner unit software supports clinical case exercise and online assessment. Cases are categorized into general thinking cases, dedicated thinking cases and doctor-patient communication cases.

4)  User management software enables users to do organization management, user batch management and user access control.

Instructor Unit

1)  Total number of cases: The system comes with 700 cases, covering more than 15 medical departments. Among them are holistic thinking cases, medical history taking cases, physical examination cases, auxiliary examination cases, treatment cases, clinician/patient communication cases and other types.

2)  Case editing: Users can edit preset cases either by modification or re-creation. Editable content includes general information, patient information, medical history taking, physical examination, auxiliary examination, diagnostic analysis, treatment content and results, evaluation system score weights and comment settings.

3)  Score settings: Scoring criteria can be set individually for cases, including score settings for different levels.

4)  Case access settings: Different cases can be opened to different teams. Training cases and examination cases are independent and instructors can set them up easily and freely.

5)  Examination: Teachers can set up different online exams for different time periods.

6)  Score enquiry: The system automatically saves each exam and exercise details, allowing teachers to view students' scores in each module and compare their performance with standard answers. One-click export of results to Excel function is available, which is convenient for instructors to summarize learners' scores.

Learner Unit

1)  History taking: The system allows for judging students' medical history taking ability from multiple aspects such as the content of students' inquiry, inquiry logic, inquiry methods, etc. and thus finally forming a scientific evaluation.

2)  Physical examination: Hundreds of operations such as visual inspection, percussion, auscultation and various specialized physical examination can be carried out. The findings are presented in texts, pictures, sounds and animations. The heart has 5 auscultation areas; the chest and back have 8 lung auscultation areas, all with preset typical cardiopulmonary auscultation sounds.

3)  Auxiliary examination: Laboratory, imaging and other auxiliary tests can be done, including general blood tests, blood biochemistry, X-ray, ECG, ultrasound, CT, MRI and other common tests. For each case, students can apply from more than 250 examination items.

4)  Imaging: Images in BMP, JPG, PNG, DICOM and other formats can be loaded for imaging examination. Teachers can post-progress DICOM files according to actual teaching needs. The post-processing function includes: 1) layout. Users can choose 1X1, 1X2, 2X1, 2X2, 2X3, 3X3, etc.; 2) Window width and level adjustments; 3) Zoom in and out; 4) Image rotation; 5) Left turn 90 degrees; 6) Right turn 90 degrees; 7) Left and right mirror flip; 8) Up and down mirror flip; 9) Negative film; 10) Distance measurement; 11) Ellipse measurement; 12) Angle measurement;13)Rectangle measurement;14)Exploration, etc.

5)  Diagnosis: Develop a working hypothesis list and follow the evidence to support learner’s final diagnosis. The system also incorporate the latest ICD codes.

6)  Treatment: There are a variety of treatment options available, such as temporary treatment, outpatient treatment, inpatient treatment, and referral treatment.

User Management

1)  Organizational settings: Users can set up organizations over 4 levels and self-define their names to facilitate multi-level management. Teachers and students can belong to multiple organizations at the same time, and different teachers can manage multiple organizations.

2)  User management: User information such as administrators, teachers, and students can be edited in batches. According to actual needs, various roles such as counselor, teaching secretary, and clinical teacher can be added. Each senior user independently manages the information of their lower-level personnel.

3)  User access control: For easy & convenient management, different accesses can be set up for each role.

4)  Batch processing: Users can import, export, delete, activate, and set passwords for personnel information in batches to save time and energy.