A Realistic Digital Deteriorating Patient to Foster Emergency Decision-Making Skills in Medical Students

The Deteriorating Patient Activity (DPA) is a real-life educational simulation that prepares medical students to effectively approach emergency situations through a role play where their instructor plays the role of a patient whose state is rapidly deteriorating. Although proven engaging and effective in improving student decision making, DPA is difficult to carry out since it requires students and medical instructors, all busy people, to be available at the same time and location. The present paper describes the "Digital" Deteriorating Patient Activity (DDPA), an agent-based tutoring system developed to allow learners to train on simple DPA cases so they can face more complex cases when meeting a human instructor.