As your mission begins, you and your classmates are part of a team of medical personnel on the Mercy, a medical/surgical ship, traveling up the Amazon River in Brazil to treat scientists stationed at research stations in the tropical rain forest.  The trauma unit also treats many other patients as the ship travels the Amazon stopping at different research stations along the way.  The research stations are located in ecological “hot spots”—areas with exceptionally high species diversity that are critically endangered. It is a prime place to collect samples of plants that might be biomedically useful. Many of the researchers are funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Natural Products Branch to collect and screen plant materials that might be promising in treatments for cancer and AIDS.

The Chief Medical Officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Headquarters alerts your team in the remote trauma unit to each situation. Your class takes on the roles of various experts and begins to work on different aspects of patient care. You work in one of four teams: Case Managers, Diagnostic Specialists, Med-Surg Specialists, and Clinical Intervention Specialists. To respond to each patient case, the trauma teams will use a state-of-the-art array of online simulated database and communications resources for diagnosis, testing, and treatment. As the students receive case histories and medical charts for each patient, the diagnostics specialists access a Medinet database that links symptoms with possible diagnoses. Specialists evaluate and identify possible causes and work with the Med-Surg Specialists to order diagnostic tests. The results of laboratory tests eliminate unlikely diagnoses, and team members continue ordering tests and analyzing results until they achieve a final diagnosis. The Clinical Intervention Specialists review the final diagnosis and test results and recommends a treatment protocol.  They also use a clinical trials database to match patient cases with clinical trials and decide if the patient is a good candidate for possible inclusion in the trial investigation. Team members find out the status of their patients after treatment and handle critical patients as they are selected by their Case Manager.