Dr. Claudia L. Johnston, Associate Vice President for Special Projects at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, will demonstrate Pulse!! The Virtual Clinical Learning Lab Oct. 7-11 at the Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons convening in New Orleans, La.
Pulse!! is an interactive virtual environment simulating operational health-care facilities, procedures and systems. The game-based platform is being designed to show whether sophisticated medical clinical learning can occur in virtual space powered by cutting-edge video-game technologies.
Pulse!! research has been supported since March 2005 by $9.85 million in federal grants through the Office of Naval Research. Pulse!! has received strong congressional support from U.S. District 27 Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi.
Pulse!! has attracted the attention of the surgical community as a means of providing clinical experience and enhanced continuing education as means of reducing medical errors. Johnston gave a keynote address in May with Dr. Janis Cannon-Bowers, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, who leads the project's evaluation team for an ACS summit on simulation in surgery education.
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) is a scientific and educational association founded in 1913 to improve the quality of care for the surgical patient by setting high standards for surgical education and practice.
The Clinical Congress will feature 38 postgraduate courses, more than 200 hours of general and specialty sessions, video-based education selections and hundreds of scientific technical exhibits from a wide variety of companies. More than 15,000 surgeons are expected to attend the meeting.
Completion of reliability and validity testing of Pulse!! as a learning and assessment tool is expected in December 2008.
