Guidelines for the design of a virtual patient for psychiatric interview training

A psychiatric diagnosis involves the physician’s ability to create an empathic interaction with the patient in order to accurately extract symptomatology (i.e., clinical manifestations). Virtual patients (VPs) can be used to train these skills but need to propose a structured and multimodal interaction situation, in order to simulate a realistic psychiatric interview. In this study we present a simulated psychiatric interview with a virtual patient suffering from major depressive disorders. We suggested some design guidelines based on psychiatry theories and medicine education standards. We evaluated our VP with user testing with 35 4th year medical students, and probed their opinion during debriefing interviews. All students showed good abilities to communicate empathetically with the VP, and managed to extract symptomatology from VP’s simulation. Students provided positive feedbacks regarding pedagogic usefulness, realism and enjoyment in the interaction, which suggests that our design guidelines are consistent and that such technologies are acceptable to medical students. To conclude this study is the first to simulate a realistic psychiatric interview and to measure both skills needed by future psychiatrists: symptomatology extraction and empathic communication. Results provide evidence for the use of VPs to complement existing tools and to train and evaluate healthcare professionals in the future.