Optimizing Clinical Training for the Treatment of PTSD Using Virtual Patients.

Adequate treatment of PTSD is a growing concern for the military. However, there is a shortage of qualified personnel available to apply this treatment. Virtual patient systems offer a novel technology to enhance the training needs of such health providers.

A Comparative Analysis between Experts and Novices Interacting with a Virtual Patient with PTSD.

Virtual patients will provide a means to train the next generation of clinical residents. Interacting and engaging with virtual characters portraying standardized patients can have meaningful outcomes. As a cumulative set of data analysis, we investigate the comparison of how well novices, subjects without any clinical interviewing background, with experts, clinicians, or resident student clinicians with interviewing skills to assess if they could elicit the proper information from verbal interactions with a virtual character.