Telemedicine and Advanced Medical Technology - Refined Training Tools for Medical Readiness

Not Available "Medical readiness for combat casualty care requires that clinicians maintain a high level of proficiency for skills that are rarely or never used in day-to-day practice. Simulation training environments seem a promising way to provide these learningopportunities, but the effectiveness of simulation-based training for clinicians remains a concern as defining clinical expertise and competency has always been problematic. Performance-measurement approaches from other high-expertise fields such asaviation, where the value of simulation-based training is well established, offer promising approaches for measuring clinical performance in combat casualty care. Our technical objective is to design and develop a performance measurement tool and acomprehensive methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of four classes of medical simulators for medical readiness training. We will apply the systematic measure-development process pioneered by Aptima for military aviation, tailoring it to themedical training domain and identifying the issues associated with measure development in multiple types of medical simulation training environments. This will be followed by a proof of concept demonstration in a mannequin simulator in collaboration withUniversity of Maryland Medical School and design of a validation methodology for the Phase II measurement approach, as well as design of a structure for a commercial integrated performance measurement database. An assessment tool such as we propose todevelop will identify and validate simulators for enhanced training of medical skills to increase patient safety. The resulting tool can be targeted to both government and commercial sectors in both a horizontal and a vertical market expansion. This toolwould allow commercial developers of medical simulators as well as medical researchers to test the effectiveness and efficiency of the simulators for training. It will also allow medical schools and other medical training institutions to make intelligentevaluations of the effectiveness of simulator tools and t