Training Medical Communication Skills with Virtual Patients: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

Effective communication is a crucial skill for healthcare providers since it leads to better patient health, satisfaction and avoids malpractice claims. In standard medical education, students’ communication skills are trained with role-playing and Standardized Patients (SPs), i.e., actors. However, SPs are difficult to standardize, and are very resource consuming. Virtual Patients (VPs) are interactive computer-based systems that represent a valuable alternative to SPs. VPs are capable of portraying patients in realistic clinical scenarios and engage learners in realistic conversations. Approaching medical communication skill training with VPs has been an active research area in the last ten years. As a result, the number of works in this field has grown significantly. The objective of this work is to survey the recent literature, assessing the state of the art of this technology with a specific focus on the instructional and technical design of VP simulations. After having classified and analysed the VPs selected for our research, we identified several areas that require further investigation, and we drafted practical recommendations for VP developers on design aspects that, based on our findings, are pivotal to create novel and effective VP simulations or improve existing ones.