Virtual Patient Simulation
Virtual patient simulation uses interactive software to represent a patient that learners can interview, examine, or counsel, often through text or voice. It enables on-demand, repeatable practice of clinical and communication skills without scheduling a standardized patient, and can deliver structured feedback after each encounter.
Source: Society for Simulation in Healthcare, Healthcare Simulation Dictionary
Virtual patient simulation is a category rather than a product, and the SSH Healthcare Simulation Dictionary reflects that by defining a virtual patient broadly as a representation of an actual patient, including software-based physiological simulators and computer programs in which the learner takes a history, examines, and makes diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Anything from a branching multiple-choice case to a spoken conversation falls inside the term, which is why the label on its own tells a program very little.
The useful question is what the learner has to produce. In a branching case the learner selects from written options, so the exercise trains recognition and clinical reasoning within a fixed set of choices. In an open, spoken encounter the learner has to compose the words themselves, and that is the skill being assessed when the objective is a conversation about a new diagnosis or a decision about goals of care. Both are virtual patient simulation, and they are not interchangeable.
The second question is what comes out of the encounter. Structured feedback tied to explicit criteria is what turns a practice session into deliberate practice, and it is also what makes the output usable to a competency committee rather than only to the learner. A program evaluating the category should ask which criteria the feedback is scored against, who wrote them, and whether the learner's actual words are preserved for review instead of summarized away.
Where virtual patient simulation fits in a curriculum follows from those two answers. Text-based cases are a reasonable way to build reasoning volume early in training, while spoken encounters are the format that prepares a learner for an SP station or a real family meeting, because the learner has to say the words out loud under time pressure. Neither format removes the need for standardized patients, and programs get the most out of the category by using it for the repetitions that a human SP schedule cannot absorb.
What this looks like in a program
- Ask whether the learner picks from options or speaks freely, because the two train different skills even though both sit under the same term.
- Feedback that names the criterion it is scoring is what lets a virtual patient encounter contribute to a competency judgment rather than to a completion record.
Last updated August 2026