Patsy: Introduction

Patsy is a multimedia database of patient data for use in clinical research and training.

This case study includes

Background on the PATSy system
The problems it faced,
II's Role in enhancing the system
What we did to enhance the system

	Notes

PATSy (www.patsy.ac.uk) is an internet-based multimedia database system that provides `virtual' patient cases to students in the clinical sciences such as clinical psychology, speech and language therapy, medicine and related fields.

It offers educators and researchers a facility for disseminating material to students and supports the dissemination of research by offering researchers a facility for storing interactive multimedia representations of their data.

Students can step through any at a test-item-by-test-item level of granularity. For example, in a test where (in real life) the clinician presents auditory stimuli, the student can listen to a digitised audio clip of a clinician presenting the items to the patient followed by digitised audio clips of the patient's actual responses to those items. The student records the patient's test results on the test's score sheet, as if the student were actually in a clinic. In light of the test data, the student may revise his or her initial clinical hypothesis with the process continuing until the student is satisfied that sufficient information to diagnose the source of the patient's speech and language problem has been acquired.

The system has been designed to be a generic database shell that can accept multimedia data from any discipline that has cases.

Patsy Background