At the beginning of the month, DecisionSim, a Chadds Ford, Pa.-based maker of simulation-based learning systems, bought online communication training and assessment technology from Drexel University College of Medicine, with the purpose of commercializing Drexel’s work. DecisionSim has named the module CommSim and is in the process of integrating it with the core platform.
“Providers are not known for being good communicators,” DecisionSim CEO Bob Yayac explained to MedCity News. The company wants to address this issue with CommSim, offering the newly acquired technology to the Department of Veterans Affairs — a customer since 2011 — and other health systems.
Drexel has offered the communications training mostly to medical students, Yayac said. DecisionSim will be making CommSim cloud-based and adding additional security to increase the appeal to the commercial market. As with current DecisionSim offerings, the communications module will be available through a Web app, optimized for both desktops and mobile devices.
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“A clinician now doesn’t need to leave the office for training,” Yayac said. This is particularly important at a place like the VA, where physicians and other healthcare professionals are so busy seeing lots of very sick patients.
CommSim is already up on DecisionSim’s hosting site and going through internal testing as the company offers the new option to its clients. “We’re trying to set up some pilots,” Yayac said.
DecisionSim started in 2010 by licensing simulation technology from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The platform follows branch learning, and clients build content based on specific problems they want to address. “Think of it as ‘choose your own adventure,” Yayac said.
The American College of Physicians, for example, has built more than two dozen simulations on the platform for access by any of its 143,000 members, mostly practicing internists and trainees in internal medicine.
