OBJECTIVE To describe the process used to implement a comprehensive, standardized, and reliable national system for data collection for HIV care and treatment in Guyana; to provide examples of the program-level data resulting from implementation; and to highlight the monitoring benefits for national programs. METHODS In 2007, Guyana's Ministry of Health and other key stakeholders adapted the ...

Interactive computer generated characters can be applied to the medical field as virtual patients for clinical training. The user interface for the virtual characters takes on the same appearance and behavior as a human. To assess if these virtual patients can be used to train skills such as interviewing and diagnosis they need to respond as a patient would. The primary goal of this study was t...

Since the inception of the Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination in 1976, we have had a mechanism in Canada of identifying preventive interventions that, if instituted by Canadian physicians, are expected to improve the health of the country’s population. Yet substantial disparities appear to exist between optimal institution of preventive care recommendations and actual practi...

OBJECTIVE To determine the diagnostic and triage accuracy of online symptom checkers (tools that use computer algorithms to help patients with self diagnosis or self triage). DESIGN Audit study. SETTING Publicly available, free symptom checkers. PARTICIPANTS 23 symptom checkers that were in English and provided advice across a range of conditions. 45 standardized patient vignettes were co...

BACKGROUND Mock oral board exams, fashioned after the live patient hour of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology exam, are commonly part of resident assessment during residency training. Exams using real patients selected from clinics or hospitals are not standardized and do not allow comparisons of resident performance across the residency program. We sought to create a standardized p...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the correlation between length of stay (LOS) and patient satisfaction on the level of hospital wards. The underlying hypothesis is that good quality of care leads both to shorter LOS and to patients that are more satisfied. DESIGN We used standardized LOS and standardized patient satisfaction data from seven specialisms: internal medicine, cardiology, pulmonology, neu...