One in 20 U.S adult outpatients is misdiagnosed every year, so the need for ongoing medical education and training is important. Reliance Foundation www.reliancefoundation.org and the University of Chicago www.uchicago.edu are collaborating on developing innovative technology to help train medical students and clinicians to improve diagnoses and healthcare. The collaboration is supporting doctors in real-time with evidence-based clinical decision-making tools.
The Reliance Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Reliance Industries based in India, has touched the lives of four million people across India through various initiatives in the areas of healthcare, education, and much more.
Researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine have developed an evidence-based approach to clinical reasoning that forms the foundation for the clinical education and point-of-care products. This approach to education is being developed with Reliance Foundation along with the research team from the U.S. and India
The partnership will develop cloud-based software applications to train medical professionals using case studies written by experienced physicians and state-of-the-art clinical reasoning methods.
Partners i-Human Patients, Inc. www.i-human.com (IHP) based in California and AgileMD www.agilemd.com developed the software to help improve medical education and provide point-of-care clinical decision support tools for healthcare practitioners. These tools will help to reduce diagnostic errors and improve outcomes.
At the 2014 TEDMED Hive held in the fall, the company i-Human Patients, Inc. announced that an enhancement to their i-Human Patients® virtual physician training platform is available. The new patent-pending functionality called Differential Diagnosis or Dynamic DDx models the diagnostic reasoning process of experienced clinicians and helps them improve the quality of clinical care. Dynamic DDX provides a complete virtual active learning experience using a computer-animated patient to replicate the patient-physician examination and diagnostic process.
First and second year medical students learn step-by-step how to identify symptoms, perform tests, and deduce a patient’s affliction using a linear approach. Advanced students, residents, graduate students, and practicing clinicians however, typically use non-linear iterative assessment and reasoning processes to reach a diagnosis. Dynamic DDx mirrors the iterative approach allowing more experienced students and clinicians to advance their diagnostic skills.