PurposeStandardized patients (SPs) tend to rate medical students’ communication skills subjectively and comprehensively, in contrast to such objective skill set defined in the clinical performance examination (CPX). Meanwhile, medical school instructors have a different approach in their evaluation of students’ communication skills. We aim to analyze medical students’ verbal communication skills using objective methods, and to determine the contributing factors of a patient–physician interaction (PPI) score.MethodsStudents with high- and low-ranking scores for PPI in CPX were selected. The Roter interaction analysis system was used to compare verbal communication behaviors of the students and SPs. Patient-centeredness scores (PCSs), physician’s verbal dominance, and number of utterances were compared between the two groups.ResultsPCSs and physician’s verbal dominance had no difference between the groups. The number of utterances during the limited time of 5 minutes of CPX was higher for the high-ranking students. They tended to employ more paraphrase/check for understanding, and closed questions for psychosocial state and open questions for medical condition. The SPs interviewed by high-ranking students gave more medical information and requested for more services.ConclusionIn the case of the routine checkup, smooth conversations with more frequent utterances were detected in the high-ranking students. More medical information exchange and requests for services by SPs were higher for the high-ranking students. Medical communication instructors should keep in mind that our results could be indicators of a high PPI score.

This study aimed to validate the predictive performance of the termination of resuscitation (TOR) rule and examine the compression time interval (CTI) as a criterion for modifying the rule. This retrospective observational study analyzed adult out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients attended by emergency medical service (EMS) providers in mixed urban–rural areas in Korea in 2020 and 2021. We evaluated the predictive performance of basic life support (BLS) and the Korean Cardiac Arrest Research Consortium (KoCARC) TOR rule using the false-positive rate (FPR) and positive predictive value (PPV). We modified the age cutoff criterion and examined the CTI as a new criterion. According to the TOR rule, 1827 OHCA patients were classified into two groups. The predictive performance of the BLS TOR rule had an FPR of 11.7% (95% confidence interval (CI): 5.9–17.5) and PPV of 98.4% (97.6–99.2) for mortality, and an FPR of 3.6% (0.0–7.8) and PPV of 78.6% (75.9–81.3) for poor neurological outcomes at hospital discharge. The predictive performance of the KoCARC TOR rule had an FPR of 5.0% (1.1–8.9) and PPV of 98.9% (98.0–99.8) for mortality, and an FPR of 3.7% (0.0–7.8) and PPV of 50.0% (45.7–54.3) for poor neurological outcomes at hospital discharge. The modified cutoff value for age was 68 years, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve over 0.7. In the group that met the BLS TOR rule, the cutoff of the CTI for death was not determined and was 21 min for poor neurological outcomes. In the group that met the KoCARC TOR rule, the cutoff of the CTI for death and poor neurological outcomes at the time of hospital discharge was 25 min and 21 min, respectively. The BLS TOR and KoCARC TOR rules showed inappropriate predictive performance for mortality and poor neurological outcomes. However, the predictive performance of the TOR rule could be supplemented by modifying the age criterion and adding the CTI criterion of the KoCARC.