Exploring a scalable real-time simulation for interprofessional education in pharmacy and medicine

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The organisational logistics and cost of interprofessional education (IPE) remain barriers to widespread embedding of IPE activities in health care training. The ability of students to undertake IPE activities in the form of treating a virtual patient independently of an instructor and facilities would be of potential benefit. In this study we explore the feasibility and potential IPE benefits of SimPHARM, a cloud based simulation platform that allows students to treat virtual patients in a real-time simulation. We enrolled three pairs of medical and pharmacy students and after familiarisation with the platform assigned them a 2 day virtual patient. At the end of the case they completed a questionnaire, an interview and we reviewed their SimPHARM log-files. The results supported the logistical feasibility of this approach. We found that most students interacted asynchronously on the platform, leaving notes for each other, in order to arrive at their clinical decisions. The participants found their interactions meaningful in helping them to make clinical decisions and learn from each other.