Communication should grow alongside clinical knowledge — not be left to chance
For medical school & ume leadership who need results they can measure.
Medical students learn anatomy and pathophysiology on a deliberate sequence, but communication is often taught unevenly and assessed inconsistently. When Step 2 CS was discontinued in 2021, schools lost the only national standardized assessment of clinical communication. ClinicalSim lets you sequence scenarios across all four years — from structured history-taking to delivering a new diagnosis — with unlimited on-demand practice and a dashboard that follows each student through clerkships.
What's at stake
The national communication exam is gone
USMLE Step 2 CS was permanently discontinued in 2021. Medical schools lost the only external, standardized assessment of clinical communication skills and have had no scalable replacement since.
Standardized-patient encounters don't scale
SP encounters are the gold standard, but at $50-$500 each and weeks of scheduling lead time, students can't get the repetition that builds real communication skill before clerkships.
Communication is taught unevenly
Across a four-year curriculum, communication instruction is often fragmented — a workshop here, an OSCE there — with no continuous arc and no longitudinal view of how each student is progressing.
Skills fade without practice
Communication is a performance skill. Without deliberate, repeated practice and feedback, the rapport-building and diagnosis-disclosure skills students learn early erode before they reach the wards.
The numbers
Step 2 CS — the national communication exam — was discontinued
USMLE / NBME
of sequenced practice, from history-taking to diagnosis disclosure
on-demand practice between standardized-patient encounters
generates structured, rubric-scored feedback
How ClinicalSim helps
A Four-Year Arc
Sequence scenarios so communication complexity rises with clinical knowledge — structured history-taking in the preclinical years, updating families on a plan in M3, and delivering a new diagnosis in M4.
Practice Between SP Encounters
ClinicalSim handles the high-volume reps between scheduled standardized-patient sessions and OSCEs, so in-person encounters are spent demonstrating skill rather than building it for the first time.
A Dashboard Through Clerkships
Follow each student's communication trajectory across the four years — not a single OSCE score, but a longitudinal view of how the skill is developing.
Built on Validated Frameworks
Scenarios and feedback draw on established communication frameworks — SPIKES, teach-back, and Calgary-Cambridge — so students learn structures they'll carry into residency.
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