| TheraSim, the world's leading provider of interactive disease simulation diagnostic and treatment training aides, announced today that the first computer-based HIV/AIDS clinical disease-simulation training pilot program will be made available to healthcare providers, clinics, medical institutions, and health agencies in more than 34 countries beginning in April. "The hardest hit geographies are our first priority," Charles Coleman, Ph.D., TheraSim's Chief Operating Officer, stated at the 11th Annual International Congress on Infectious Diseases hosted in Cancun.
"Based on the current statistics and forward-looking concerns reiterated at this year's Congress, let there be no mistake that HIV/AIDS--and its killing-cousin, TB--are bludgeoning areas of the world's population back into plague-like conditions which will test our professional resolve and our global resources like nothing seen in the past fifty years," he said at this gathering of more than 2,000 of the world's best and brightest infectious disease clinicians and allied specialists from more than 90 countries.
Sponsored by the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID),
a Boston-based non-profit professional society of physicians and scientists from approximately 150 countries, this bi-annual Congress is considered a leading forum for bringing infectious disease clinicians, researchers and public health officials together from around the world to find innovative ways to advance the global community's knowledge in control, prevention and treatment of emerging and infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
"HIV/AIDS is a scourge,"
Dr. Coleman said, "and even though governments, world health agencies and philanthropies have begun rising to 'the challenge,' the fact remains that a real challenge is not only about the availability of anti-retroviral drugs or the ability to distribute them to remotely infected populations, but the catastrophic shortage of healthcare providers trained in the dosing, administration and monitoring of these highly complex agents. At the end of the day, it's all about how many people can we train in-country, how quickly, how well, and how efficiently," he said. "Isn't it time that we brought the training to the people who need it the most?"
Timothy Brewer, M.D., MPH, Program Director for ISID concurred:
"The traditional training methods we employ are not able to expand the cadre of HIV-ready clinicians at the pace required to meet the demands of the epidemic on an international scale. To meet the global need for qualified HIV care providers in the near future, it is essential that new training tools and methods be developed. Electronic-based training programs have the potential to dramatically increase the number of clinicians who may be trained at the same time and with substantially less cost. The TheraSim diagnostic and treatment simulation software is an exciting opportunity to set a training standard in HIV heretofore unattainable on a large scale," he said.
Although simulators have been used to train millions of professionals over the past 50 years--ranging from pilots and paramedics to surgeons and military units--clinical simulation specifically designed to train practitioners to diagnose and treat patients compromised by infectious and chronic disease is revolutionary, according to David Hadden, CEO of TheraSim, a Raleigh, North Carolina firm.
"The practice of medicine has always been an art based on the science of discovery, interpretation, diagnoses and treatment. But with the proliferation of increasingly more complex diseases coupled with the extraordinary advances in drug development and genotyping, practitioners simply do not have the time, the resources or the complete body of knowledge at their disposal to train the tens of thousands of healthcare providers required to treat the explosive HIV/AIDS populations worldwide. Given this impossible scenario, its time to task computers and software applications to do what they do best: rapidly leverage information to eliminate the training bottleneck in global clinical capacity expansion, which is exactly what we have achieved with our TheraSim clinical simulator and by joining with ISID to begin pilot project implementations."
In response to the question:
"What are the next steps for a global roll-out of the clinical simulator for HIV/AIDS training?,"
Mr. Hadden replied:
"This is a highly collaborative effort and will require that we continue to work closely with organizations like ISID, the WHO, national and local governing bodies, clinics and teaching hospitals, and funding agencies and private industry to reach more and teach more healthcare providers in order to save more lives through in-country, computer-based training."
About the International Society for Infectious Diseases
The International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) is a professional organization with a global membership of physicians, scientists, microbiologists and public health officials committed to improving knowledge and practices in the care of patients with infectious diseases, research in infectious diseases and microbiology, and the prevention and control of infectious diseases around the world. The Society recognizes that infectious diseases cross all national and regional boundaries, and that effective long-term solutions require international exchange and cooperation. ISID and its members are dedicated to developing partnerships and to finding solutions to the problem of infectious diseases across the globe.
The main goals of the ISID are to increase the knowledge base of infectious diseases through research and to enhance the professional development of the individual in this discipline; to extend and transfer technical expertise in microbiology and infectious diseases; and to develop, through partnerships, strategies for control and cost-effective management of infectious diseases.
About TheraSim®, Inc.
TheraSim, Inc. is dedicated to improving patient lives through better support of healthcare professionals with state of the art software tools and services. TheraSim reduces the variability in the delivery of medical treatment and enables healthcare professionals to more rapidly assimilate new medical information and make more effective clinical decisions. |
