Shadow Health: Augmenting Health Assessment with a  Virtual Patient Simulator

This is an undergraduate course for novice nursing students. Students should leave the course with skills that provide the foundation for the entirety of their nursing career, focusing on how to effectively and succinctly interview and examine their future patients. For those with innate skills, this can be accomplished with the traditional teaching styles. For many others, however, there are not enough opportunities to refine those skills given the high student to faculty ratio. To redesign this course, a couple of major changes were made: 1) a Digital Clinical Experience was added to the course, giving students additional opportunities to interview and examine patients in a virtual lab, and receive immediate feedback on their performance; and 2) a flipped classroom model, providing additional opportunities for students to engage with the content, with the hope of improving their interview and exam skills.