Personalized Medicine Decision-Making in a Virtual Clinical Setting

This study will examine factors related to primary care physicians clinical decision-making. Using a virtual clinical interaction experiment, we aim to better understand physicians decision-making processes and to explore their communication behaviors toward patients in the clinical encounter. Physician participants will enter a virtual exam room where they will be asked to respond to a virtual patient, acting as her primary care physician in a follow-up visit to evaluate her for depression. Various aspects of physician communication in the virtual clinic and self-report measures related to decision-making will be analyzed.

• INCLUSION CRITERIA:
• All physicians will be healthy adult volunteers who are medical residents in the internal medicine specialty.

Exclusion criteria

• persons with seizure or vestibular disorders;
• persons who are highly prone to motion sickness;
• those without normal or normal to corrected vision or hearing;
• all current and past employees and contractors of NHGRI; and
• persons who have received information about the study purpose or procedure from a past participant.

NHGRI employees are excluded for this protocol because they are likely to have specialized genomic knowledge and may think differently about genomics in the clinical interaction.