The (future) doctor will see you now: Piloting a longitudinal virtual patient in medical education, simulating general practice.

Introduction: Virtual patients provide numerous learning opportunities for medical students, yet only support one-off patient interactions. To emulate general practice, allowing multiple encounters with a single patient, a new longitudinal virtual patient (LVP) was developed.

Methods: The LVP was integrated into 2nd year at a graduate-entry medical school, in the 2019/2020 academic year.

Age and disease severity predict choice of atypical neuroleptic: a signal detection approach to physicians' prescribing decisions.

Objective: We used a novel application of a signal detection technique, receiver operator characteristics (ROC), to describe factors entering a physician's decision to switch a patient from a typical high potency neuroleptic to a particular atypical, olanzapine (OLA) or risperidone (RIS).

Methods: ROC analyses were performed on pharmacy records of 476 VA patients who had been treated on a high potency neuroleptic then changed to either OLA or RIS.

Results: Overall 68% patients switched to OLA and 32% to RIS.

Which Alzheimer patients are at risk for rapid cognitive decline?

In the current study of 1062 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, we employed receiver operating characteristic curve analysis to identify characteristics of patients at increased risk for rapid cognitive decline. The patients are participants at one of the nine Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers of California. Rapid decline was defined as a 3-point or greater loss on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) per year, post visit.