February 26, 2024-March 14, 2024
Course Director
Ankur A. Doshi, MD
Assistant Professor
Department of Emergency Medicine
doshiaa@upmc.edu
Course Description
This course serves as a bridge between pre-clinical coursework and clinical clerkships. Students employ their knowledge base and data-gathering skills gained during pre-clinical coursework. Applying and building upon this foundation, students pursue clinical management of virtual patient cases. The course utilizes a small student group setting with a clinical faculty facilitator emphasizing self-directed and peer group-based learning.
Thus in this course students develop key skills needed for upcoming clerkships, including data-acquisition, clinical decision making, and team-building/professionalism.
Course Objectives
- To apply the information learned during the first 2 years to clinical problems, thus further developing independent active learning, data-acquisition, and clinical decision making skills.
- To improve problem-solving, team-building, and communication skills.
- To simulate clinical experiences and so to function as a bridge to the direct patient responsibilities and clinical problem solving of the third-year clerkships.
Educational Methods
The format of the course is exclusively small group collaborative learning with virtual patient encounters. The computer-assisted learning environment has the following advantages: 1) It provides a data repository to expedite the use of images as well as textual data for the cases; 2) It enhances communication among the students of each group by adding electronic capability to classroom interaction; 3) It provides a means to track the approach of students in each case, thus helping the faculty assess the effectiveness of case material.
During the cases, students will be required to answer basic science and clinical questions about the virtual patient encounters in real time. Students may need to access necessary information such as: 1) Textual reference material that they have previously utilized during the previous two years; 2) Appropriate reference materials from the internet such as journal articles, reference texts, and clinical guidelines. Therefore, students will need to provide an internet connected device during class.
- Virtual patient simulation
- Group-based learning
Evaluation
Evaluation is based on in-class performance.
Grading: Grading for the course is Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory.
Requests for excused absences should be submitted here. Unexcused absences may result in grading penalties as outlined in the Policy on Absence and Attendance.