Making Shirley
As Helen and I drove down the M6 in the rain yesterday, something struck me…..
In 1996, I travelled – I had no email, no mobile phone – my family got a postcard every couple of weeks
In 1997, I started at university – they gave us a clunky email that resembled an MS-DOS screen – we thought it was great
In 2000, I did a PGCE – for the first time I used the internet for research – my paper on health education for behaviour change was largely in debt to online publications
Here we are in 2009, not a huge number of years later, and Helen and I were driving down the M6 after meeting the Head of the Pharmacy School at Keele University. What he showed us was mind blowing!
They have developed the virtual patient – an avatar called Shirley who walks up to the pharmacy counter, coughs, snuffles and waits for you to start the conversation. Depending on what you, as the pharmacist, chose to say or do, Shirley will respond. The prototype is using text input, but the future masterpiece version will use voice recognition. It’s ingenious and totally captivating!
The consultation scenario that Shirley demonstrates is based on a decision tree algorithm – an interlinking set of questions, answers and decision points that dictate what Shirley will say and do. These algorithms are incredibly complex to build, we know, because we have just completed our first set for the alli launch that has been used to train pharmacists across the land. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done so far, but I can’t help wanting to take scenario training to the next level.
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