The transfusion medicine tutor: the use of expert-systems technology to teach students and provide support to practitioners in antibody identification

The studies presented here provide data regarding the effectiveness of the expert-system-based Transfusion Medicine Tutor (TMT) when used by medical technology students and medical technologists in performing an important problem-solving task, the identification alloantibodies in a patient's blood for the purpose of finding compatible blood for transfusion. TMT monitors for slips and mistakes during the evaluation of patient cases, and provides suggestions to the student or technologist when a potential concern is detected. Use of that system was found to reduce errors in final answers on various multiple antibody cases by 30%-62% by practicing medical technologists. Similarly, use of a modified version of the system for teaching was found to enhance learning by 87--93%.