Mastering During Difficult Situations with Patients

Working in the healthcare community isn’t always easy. Many times healthcare professionals have to communicate difficult news to patients and their loved ones.

Working in the healthcare community isn’t always easy. Many times healthcare professionals have to communicate difficult news to patients and their loved ones.

As demands on healthcare providers increase, compassion becomes more difficult to sustain. But new training promises to help healthcare providers meet those challenges. Drexel University College of Medicine is developing an online medical education program called WebPatientEncounter.com to help healthcare professionals learn practices and assess complex clinical skills – for example bad news delivery, smoking cessation counseling, or organ donation counseling, using simulated interactions with patients and their families.

Besides assisting physicians and other healthcare professionals with structured feedback on performance as well as video examples of best practices, the program is also designed to help hospitals boost patient satisfaction scores, which impacts Medicare reimbursement.

Using simulators in medical training isn’t new. In fact, many IT companies are taking similar approaches in developing tools to improve patient and physician communication.