Teaching Empathy: the Implementation of a Video Game into a Psychiatry Clerkship Curriculum.

Objective: Empathy plays an important role for physicians, but the literature demonstrates that it often deteriorates during medical school. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of the interactive video game "That Dragon, Cancer" as a tool to teach empathy to third-year medical students.

Methods: The authors gave a modified, Jefferson Scales of Physician Empathy (JSPE) to 84 third-year medical students in their psychiatry clerkship before and after they played and completed "That Dragon, Cancer" during the 2016-2017 academic calendar year.