The new Clinical Skills Education and Assessment Center is poised to be a great boon for Ohio State medical students, providing revolutionary teaching methods and technology.

“Our major goal is to provide good education through research and find what makes a good doctor,” said Dan Clinchot, director of the center.

Graduates, undergraduates and faculty will all benefit from the new facility, scheduled to open March 5 in the basement of the Health Science Library.

“It will be beneficial to all medical students – it doesn’t matter what year,” said Carol Hasbrouck, assistant dean for Clinical Skills Education and Assessment. “It’s for anyone entering the program to be a physician (or) its allied fields of medicine.”

The center will feature such advanced technology as a full-wireless Internet environment, medical simulators complete with mannequins and electronic monitoring stations.

“Some (of the simulators) are virtual reality, some are microscopic, and they assess where they are by a LCD screen. The students receive feedback from the mannequins as if they were real patients — they can only tell they’re fake when the lights come on. It’s like the airline simulators used to train pilots,” Clinchot said.

Other technological improvements include a massive four-terabyte hard drive to store each student and patient’s vital information and videoconferencing cameras to allow OSU students to observe OSU Hospitals’ professionals in action.

Clinchot said an updated, standardized medical exam, which will be introduced this June, helped spark the project’s inception; the center will be tailor-made to prepare students for the exam. The test, titled United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 2, will asses students’ communication, patient care and clinical reasoning skills.

Students will also have to diagnose 10 to 12 patients after listening to each’s laundry list of symptoms.

“One hundred fifty standardized patients applied, so there has been great interest from the community,” Clinchot said. “We need a wide spectrum of people to portray all ages.”