Usability Evaluation of a Pediatric Virtual Patient Creation Tool

Virtual patients are computer simulations that behave in the same way that an actual patient would in a medical context. Since these characters are simulated, they can provide realistic yet repetitive practice in patient interaction since they can represent a wide range of patients and each scenario can be practiced until the student achieves competency. However, the development costs for virtual patients are high, since creation of a single scenario may take up to nine months. In this work, we present a virtual patient platform that reduces development costs. The SIDNIE (Scaffolded Interviews Developed by Nurses in Education) system can adapt a single scenario to multiple levels of learners and supports the selection of multiple learning goals. Previously, we worked with nurse educators in a participatory design process to create a scenario builder tool for SIDNIE [paper in submission]. In this work we detail a usability evaluation of the scenario creation tool. We found that nurse educators were able to use our tool to create a virtual patient scenario in less than two hours.