shadowhealth - a student/consumer's review

Shadowhealth is an online virtual patient interview & assessment application. At first, I was amused with this interesting concept. However, after having to do so many modules with frustrating results, I'm very frustrated with this.  When I say 'frustrating results', I'd like to say that it's emotionally frustrating because it adds little value to real life scenarios.  I always made over 95% for the score but that means I'm doing a lot of mindless questions instead of really solving problems. Here's my review of Shadowhealth as a student consumer: I paid $100, not cheap for your student's budget. It was required as part of our clinical lab. Some of my classmates said they wrote letters to the NP course coordinator and may start petition to stop using it. Tho I'd hate to see it go because I think there's sth cool about being able to get a complete health history of someone, I feel relieved not having to do this. Anyways, here are the pros & cons:

Pros:
- Interesting concept
- Super thorough history taking practice.
- You can get a complete health history, that's cool! I love completeness!
- Easy way to earn points for your class. It's just making sure you ask all questions needed. It's just labor-intensive.

Cons:
- Expensive for its worth: $100
- Requires little critical clinical thinking. I think a good module would be to learn to solve different case scenarios from a test bank instead of mindlessly asking PQRST, OLDCARTSSS, it's not how learning works. I can train a computer to do that!
- Unrealistic & time-consuming: expect to spend 2hr-4hrs at least for focused exam because you'll have to ask many questions in many different ways to thoroughly make sure you have covered all systems and all aspects of any symptoms. Many folks claimed they spent well over 11 hrs for 1 module. Imagine you have like about 10 modules like that on top of your very busy work schedule and other classes you have to take! Horrible experience! Can you imagine spending 2-4hrs to obtain a full history for 1 acute chief complaint? That's very unrealistic in this world! In fact, as a practicing nurse, you'll learn to ask the directed questions but not leading questions to elicit the most important information. That is not what the module is built for in here.


~me