Curious as to your sources of information

Hi all, so:

I'm interested to know how you guys have researched/planned what diseases, symptoms etc. are in your game.
I'm sitting here as a recently graduated med. student (last friday woo!), and I find myself wondering "do they have a medical background, or are they basically teaching themselves medicine?"

Things I'm especially interested in are, for instance, are people's presenting complaints random based on a group of symptoms, or are they more probabilistic? Like, is it 50/50 whether a heart attack would present with pain or with nausea, or is it more like 65/35 or whatever the ratio is? (maybe I should actually know what the ratio is)

I'm just wondering what level of depth you're pitching at.

Hi, we have access to different levels of medical education (general medicine) and work experience in hospitals both within our team (and recently among a group of experts that got in touch during development), so the whole database of diseases, diagnoses and traumas was designed taking actual clinical experience in account.

Each diagnosis is represented by a set of symptoms, usually slightly reduced in numbers or merged to fit gameplay. Every symptom has a certain probability of appearance that varies between different diseases. For example: Nausea has 95% probability of appearance in Cholecystitis but only 60% in Babesiosis. This gives us the opportunity to create diseases that look similar and create a challenge for players in the diagnosis process.

Igor, thanks for the reply!

I can't say much about this other than wow... this sounds really cool.
Kudos to you guys for thinking about it properly.

Is your patient population controlled as well, or is it pretty random what people show up with?

Barbaruvian wrote:Igor, thanks for the reply!

I can't say much about this other than wow... this sounds really cool.  
Kudos to you guys for thinking about it properly.

Is your patient population controlled as well, or is it pretty random what people show up with?

I'm really sorry, that i am replying to your question so late.

Patient population come with player's contracting different insurance companies. Those send him certain amount of patients, that vary among diagnoses. For example one company may send to player only relatively easy and uncomplicated cases, and another one those complicated, rare, etc.

igor.oxymoron wrote:
I'm really sorry, that i am replying to your question so late.

Patient population come with player's contracting different insurance companies. Those send him certain amount of patients, that vary among diagnoses. For example one company may send to player only relatively easy and uncomplicated cases, and another one those complicated, rare, etc.

The question about the regulation of the number of patients I have recently asked myself and that's exactly what I imagined! This way you can regulate the influx of patients according to your own ideas / requirements. Thumbs up!