Correlation between Medical Students' Grades and Computerized Multimedia Simulated Patient Cases generated by DxR Clinician Software

Abstract

Background: Medical education through computer software has been widely used among medical students throughout the world. DxR Clinician is available software in Thailand. It is useful for problem-based learning, which helps students to improve their diagnostic performances.

Objective: This study aimed to assess the correlation between formative family medicine scores of fifth year medical students and scores of diagnostic reasoning ability provided by DxR Clinician software. We studied on the correlation of both scores to determine the accuracy of the software analysis system.

Materials and Methods: In year 2005-2006, 183 medical students from Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, were assigned to complete cases in DxR Clinician software. 12 groups of students conducted 7 patients case-based. This research study on the correlation between the Clinical Reasoning Score (CRS), the Level of Diagnostic Performance (LDP), the Management Scores (MS) of DxR Clinician software, and compared with the scores of medical students when they passed family medicine rotation. Statistics were reported by using SPSS program.

Results: There were no significant correlations between overall performance scores and grading scores. Moreover, the students who had high family medicine grades had low Clinical Reasoning Score (CRS) and Level of Diagnostic Performance (LDP).

Conclusions: All of scores generated by computerized simulated patient software could not determine the knowledge level of the students. There was no correlation between the level of diagnostic performance, clinical reasoning ability and students’ grades. Teachers should justify the students’ scores when using this educational too.