The clinicians behind the cases

Dr. Jawahar Karreddula Thomas is a fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners by examination and credentialed to work in hospitals in the state of South Australia. He suffered a life-threatening stroke and was assessed by a medical council-appointed neuropsychiatrist as being unable to ever practice clinical medicine again.

During this period, which progressed into an extended sabbatical, Dr. Thomas founded Meksi, a groundbreaking platform that simulates clinical consultations using AI-driven virtual patients. His academic work bridges the fields of diagnostic reasoning, simulation-based education, and logic-based inference systems. Over the course of this time, Dr. Thomas led the development of the Meksi Propositional Inference Model — a novel clinical reasoning framework that applies propositional logic to analyse learner performance.

Rather than evaluating outcomes alone, the model maps omissions and decision gaps back to their cognitive source: Did the learner not know the question? Did they forget to ask it? Did they misrecognise a pattern? Or did they consider it but dismiss it wrongly? This allows for dynamic, automated generation of what Dr. Thomas calls a “cognitive footprint report” — identifying the thinking flaws behind each missed action and offering individualised feedback and remediation.

This work is currently under peer review with BMJ Innovations and represents one of the first scalable frameworks for cognitive evaluation in virtual clinical training environments. It also integrates seamlessly with curriculum requirements for EPAs, Miller’s Pyramid, and CPD portfolios.

Beyond his platform innovation, Dr. Thomas actively collaborates with universities and medical schools to redesign assessment strategies that prioritise reasoning transparency, not just diagnostic accuracy. His academic interests include diagnostic error analysis, AI in medical education, and the future of digital competence mapping in healthcare. He is committed to shaping a generation of clinicians not just trained in what to ask — but in understanding why they miss what they miss.

Dr. Thomas has now returned to clinical practice after successfully suing the medical council — a pivotal point that made him thereafter a public interest litigant. However, he considers his most precious qualification being dad to Zara and Amaan.

Dr Rebecca Saunderson is a Sydney dermatologist, a fellow of the Australasian College of Dermatology, and the CEO of Consentic.

Consentic provides animations that show patients what will happen during medical procedures and streamlines consent forms to make things clearer and easier.

Dr Saunderson is an enthusiastic supporter of MEKSI, which shares similar values of using technology to improve the quality and safety of healthcare in Australia.

Dr Saunderson believes in a holistic approach to patient care and has a keen interest in complex dermatological cases, medical and paediatric dermatology.

The recipient of several prizes and scholarships including a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to undertake a Master's at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Saunderson is committed to outreach and has worked in rural South Africa, Christmas Island, Central Australia and East Timor, and has been published in local and international peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Craig Adams is an Australian-born medical doctor and university Professor (Medical Education) who teaches in the discipline of clinical skills.

With vast experience, Dr Adams's expertise includes bedside diagnosis, practical procedures, and the principles of 'first-port-of-call' Emergency Medicine & Trauma.

With a personal philosophy of patient-centred care, Dr Adams sees enormous value in MEKSI in terms of patient safety and clinical training of doctors.

Dr Adams has served as a Professor at Fiji National University and as an Associate Professor of Clinical Skills at Notre Dame University in Sydney.

He has also served as a lecturer in surgery and clinical anatomy at Melbourne University.

He is the author of Clinical Medicine, a book that teaches core clinical skills for medical students.

Dr. Norman Eizenberg has been involved in medical education, especially teaching anatomy to medical students and surgical trainees, for more than 40 years.

He is Associate Professor in the Melbourne Clinical School at The University of Notre Dame and Honorary Principal Fellow in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at The University of Melbourne as well as a general medical practitioner.

Dr. Eizenberg also serves as Anatomy Specialty Editor for the ANZ Journal of Surgery and Chair of Anatomy Examiners for the Royal ANZ College of Radiologists.

As the project lead behind the multi-award winning An@tomedia, a pioneering online anatomical learning tool launched in 1999. The comprehensive, interactive, self-paced learning program explores anatomy from four different perspectives.

On MEKSI

I saw instantly that MEKSI is the perfect companion to An@tomedia,” said Dr. Eizenberg.

MEKSI is extremely valuable for students in preparing for Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) throughout their course. The student is required to formulate questions to pick up key green flags and red flags —within the time available.

All this is mirrored beautifully in MEKSI. It’s been designed to help doctors be competent, but MEKSI is also presented in a caring way that’s user friendly. It emphasises the patient as a whole person: physical, mental and emotional.

Students can see how an expert in the field would do things, through a short video. The expert gives them the necessary background. Then the student receives a specific case — the virtual patient— to whom they ask questions and recommend tests directed toward a diagnosis. This can be done anywhere, at any time, safely by the students, who receive immediate feedback on their performance via an overall mark together with a breakdown and explanation for each component.