SIMULATION-BASED PROSTATE CANCER PATIENT EDUCATION

描述：前列腺癌很严重，在美国每年有4.4万人死于前列腺癌，是第二大死因。但对患者来说，理解和应用前列腺癌的信息是很困难的：这些信息通常很难理解，变化很快，关于治疗的医学观点相互矛盾，而且选择往往没有吸引力。我们相信，如果患者能够练习将前列腺癌信息应用到实际病例中，这一困难将大大减少。我们建议使用流行病学数据来建立一个基于计算机的模拟系统，患者可以使用该系统进行此类实践，并将其与当前基于计算机的信息传递的最佳实践进行比较，特别是由nci赞助的PDQ网站提供的实践。我们的测试方案将侧重于患者解读前列腺癌信息的能力，以及形成医学上适当的意愿。模拟在其他复杂的教育和培训领域取得了不同寻常的成功。我们相信它可以有效地应用于前列腺癌患者教育。如果在患者推理中获得明显更好的结果，则证实了将高质量模拟应用于患者教育的实用性，并支持将工作扩展到商业产品的可行性。

DESCRIPTION: Prostate cancer is serious, 44 thousand men die of it in the United States per year, the second leading cause of death. But understanding and applying prostate cancer information is difficult for patients: The information is often difficult to understand, it changes rapidly, there is conflicting medical opinion about treatment, and the choices are often unattractive. We believe that if patients could practice applying prostate cancer information to realistic cases, this difficulty would be greatly reduced. We propose to use epidemiological data to build a computer-based simulation system chat patients could use for such practice, and to compare it to best current practice in computer-based information delivery, specifically that provided by the NCI-sponsored PDQ Web site. Our test protocol will focus on patients' ability to interpret prostate cancer information and form medically-appropriate intentions. Simulation has been unusually successful in other complex education and training domains. We believe it can be applied effectively to prostate cancer patient education. If measurably better results in patient reasoning are obtained, the utility of applying high-quality simulation to patient education is confirmed and the feasibility of expanding the work into a commercial product is supported.