Virtual medical learning: a comprehensive study on the role of new technologies
Authors: Tang Mi , Zhou Hongmei , Yan Qingyan , Li Ruoyu , Lu Hui 
Published: June 2021

Purpose

Healthcare employs informatics to offer its services through information technology where the social network can aid virtual medical learning. Since the usage of the internet and other electronic tools for medical services delivery is at the initial stage, it is essential to examine the factors that condition patients and medical elements in a virtual environment can develop relationship models on the health services. So, the authors have systematically reviewed virtual medical learning and offered some suggestions for the upcoming works. The authors have also discovered gaps in the state-of-the-art papers and provided solutions for them.

Design/methodology/approach

Numerous novel advancements have changed the old exercise of therapeutic and analytic learning. Virtual spaces have quickly turned into a section of the learning technology vision. Given the importance of its achievements and endless low-cost expansion of the educational system, virtual education has been considered as one of the issues raised by the information communities. Medicine and health are some of the most important fields in virtual technologies. Hence, in this paper, we have used a systematic literature review to deeply examine virtual medical learning. After establishing exclusion and inclusion criteria, an independent systematic search in Google Scholar, ACM, Scopus, Eric, Science Direct, Springer link, Emerald, Global ProQuest and IEEE for relevant studies have been performed, and 21 papers have been analyzed. Detailed data have been mined out of the papers.

Findings

The authors have found that virtual medical learning improves and expands the knowledge core and meaningfully affects the exercise. Virtual learning (VL) has been used in many therapeutic zones, like therapeutic learning, surgery, diagnosing, combining and regularizing processes. It has presented a fundamental access point and a referral mechanism for all of a course's component communities. It can also simplify communicative education, allowing learners to get abilities before applying them in a real-world situation. Also, the communicative characteristics of different VL programs can somehow be like direct teaching.

Research limitations/implications

Some excellent work may be removed owing to applying the filters to select the primary papers. Surveying all the documents on the topic of virtual medical learning is impossible, too. Nevertheless, the authors have tried to present a perfect survey of virtual medical learning. The results will be helpful for scholars to propose better virtual medical learning techniques.

Practical implications

E-learning has become an indispensable additional learning tool in medical education. The introduction of new learning technologies, the exponential growth of Internet usage and the advent of the World Wide Web can change the face of higher education. The results will be helpful for scholars for the upcoming works. The application of a literature review of partial least squares theory was useful for offering comprehensive literary coverage and completing the knowledge development analysis. The authors have backed scholars and experts for better understanding the development of virtual medical learning systems via presenting comparative data and scrutinizing the present advances.

Originality/value

The paper enhances intellectual knowledge by improving the conception of virtual medical learning. It informs the development, use of virtual medical learning and the upcoming works. The lack of comprehensive papers in this field has increased the importance of this paper. The present paper can handle the pace of publications.