title: Enabling interoperability, accessibility and reusability of virtual patients across Europe - design and implementation.
abstract: Virtual Patients (VPs) have successfully been integrated into medical and healthcare curricula for a number of years. Lack of time and resources is a frequently reported problem encountered when developing VPs for teaching and learning. Consequently there is a need for cross-institutional repositories of VPs. The aims of the study were two-fold: to enable interoperability between virtual patient systems and to investigate if (and how) an application profile is implemented in four different types of VP systems. This European collaborative implementation of a blend of several specifications (Medbiquitous VP XML, Medbiquitous Healthcare LOM, and SCORM) is innovative and the study has shown a variation in how the application profile could be implemented.
authors.affiliation: Virtual Patient Lab, Department of LIME, Karolinska Institutet, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden. Nabil.Zary@ki.se
authors.forename: Nabil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zary
authors.forename: Inga
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Hege
authors.forename: Jörn
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Heid
authors.forename: Luke
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Woodham
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Donkers
authors.forename: Andrzej A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Kononowicz
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005060:Europe; D010361:Patients; D012985:Software Design; D014584:User-Computer Interface