With today's health care advances, the geriatric patient can now live many years. However, as our population ages with the associated demands on the health care system, medical educators are challenged to add geriatrics into already dense medical school and residency curriculum.
To meet this challenge, we have created a series of geriatric virtual patient teaching resources based on five geriatric patients, each on a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM allows a teacher to access, via disease topics or specialty/discipline links, resources to illustrate key concepts associated with various basic science disciplines and clinical specialties. Each CD is built upon a real patient, to ensure a realistic portrayal and includes a combination of:
Video clips (1-3 min in length) of the geriatric patient who ages over a 20-30 year span depicting the patient's interactions with physicians, nurses, PT's, OT's, social workers, psychologists, and family members.
Radiographic images associated with the patient's disease including x-rays, swallow studies, bone density scans, and carotid Doppler studies.
Assessment results using common geriatric tools (e.g., functional assessment).
Family pedigrees to explore the potential genetic etiology for the patient's disease(s).
OT/PT support including incontinence clinic, home assessment and rehabilitation.
Geriatric patients are a wonderful resource for illustrating key basic science and clinical concepts. By incorporating these resources into your teaching – we hope to achieve our ultimate goal: to provide needed exposure to issues commonly encountered with aging patients not only acutely, but life long. We hope that these easily accessible resources will enable you to use your creativity as a teacher to make our "virtual patients" come alive, thereby improving the care for geriatric patients.
Mr. Karl Andrews, Chief Diagnosis: Atherosclerosis/Diabetes (pdf)
Mrs. Esther DuBois, Chief Diagnosis: Breast Cancer/Arthritis (pdf)
Mrs. Mitsuko Tang, Chief Diagnosis: Osteoporosis/Incontinence (pdf)
Mr. & Mrs. Fred & Eleanor Clifford: Aging-Longevity, Hearing and Vision, Infection-Bacterial and Viral, Injury-Motor Vehicle, Oral Health, Prostatitis, Sexuality, Skin Cancer (pdf)
Are you interested in knowing what topics are covered on each of the CD-ROMs? View a document (PDF) that shows a listing of each CD and the specific topic areas for each.
RESIDENT TRAINING: Order your Objective Structured Video Examination Toolkit (OSVEs) [Read More]
Order your Virtual Patient CDs
Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Centers
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