AmritaCREATE, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, has authored an article on Medical Virtual Patient Simulator (MedSim), which was featured as a cover story on Computer Society of India’s CSI Communications magazine of Computer Society of India (CSI) in its August 2017 issue with the theme, “ICT in Healthcare”. Authored by Dr. Prema Nedungadi, Director, AmritaCREATE, Dr. Romita Shine, Mr. Rathish G and Dr. Raghu Raman, Chairman, School of Business, Coimbatore, the title of the article is “The Medical Virtual Patient Simulator MedSIM) – an initiative under eHealth Digital India”.

One of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s major strengths is its focus on inter-disciplinary research for societal benefit. By leveraging its strong academic & research programmes in engineering & medicine, several path-breaking products and innovations have been deployed with an Indian context and relevance to national goals. One such project is Medical Virtual Patient Simulator (MedSIM) funded by Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India and implemented by AmritaCREATE (Center for Research on Advanced Technologies for Education), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and CDAC, Trivandrum under Digital India, eHealth Mission with guidance from doctors at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) Kochi & Trivandrum Medical College.

Medical education in India, with 400 medical colleges and an annual intake of 63,000 students, has been slower in the adoption of educational technologies. Many medical institutions of higher education in India are grappling with the financial justification to design, develop and deploy costly training programs involving the use education technologies like interactive simulation and virtual patients. MedSIM brings a new approach to computer-aided medical teaching and learning by using dynamic simulation and interactive experiments. It consists of a framework that supports various patient cases, tailored by interdisciplinary medical teams. Each virtual patient case follows the critical path to be followed for a specific patient in a hospital. MedSIM takes the student on a journey that enables the student to interview, examine, conduct physical, systematic and ultimately reach a diagnosis based on the path that is chosen. This work derives its inspiration and guidance from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Chancellor, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

The Computer Society of India (CSI) Communications is the national journal & magazine of CSI. It has a circulation of 151,000 & has been published regularly for the last 40 years. Prof. Prashant R. Nair, Vice-Chairman, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore is the current editor of CSI communications.