A Galway company is supplying uniquely suitable software to allow final year Psychiatry students at UCD to take their clinical skills exams remotely.
NUI Galway spinout company Qpercom has supplied unique video technology that is allowing over 200 psychiatry students at UCD to take their four stage clinicals skills exams online.
These Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) exams are meant to test the clinical skills picked up during their hospital placements, and would ordinarily take place in a face to face setting, but cannot due so due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Dr Thomas Kropmans, CEO of Qpercom and lecturer at NUIG said that while Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet have changed the playing field in communications and work meetings lately, they are not suitable for all scenarios.
“This particular exam requires a flow of students going through a series of consecutive stations – video rooms – with simulated patients or actors and their examiner.”
This is something that he says their platform Observe can accomplish easily in a way that other software solutions can’t.
Professor Allys Guérandel, Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Professor at UCD, said that these exams are crucial for ensuring that their students are fully competent and assessed for practicing clinical medicine.
“We have been using Qpercom software since 2013 to effectively support our OSCE but adopting Qpercom‘s video integration software solution for assessment in Sept 2020 allowed us to carry out our usual clinical assessment to the highest standard, albeit within an online framework.”
Dave Cunningham, CTO and Co-Founder of Qpercom, said that there are major logistical and technological challenges involved with finding a solution that matches the exam format.
They have to be able to provide a platform that allows students to move from one video station to the next, while other parties participate remotely and retrieve data. “But they are challenges which we believe we have solved using Qpercom Observe”.
