Virtual Patient Simulation for Medical Education
Explore how CyberPatient virtual patients support history-taking, physical examination, diagnosis and patient management in medical education.
What is virtual patient simulation?
Virtual patient simulation gives learners interactive clinical cases in an online environment. CyberPatient is a virtual training hospital where learners practise patient assessment and clinical decisions before discussing their reasoning with educators.
What can learners practise?
Work through history-taking, physical examination, investigations, diagnosis and patient management. Review case feedback to identify gaps and decide what to practise next.
A walkthrough of a clinical encounter
Begin by interviewing the virtual patient. Choose an examination and investigations, interpret the information, and develop a diagnosis and management plan. The interface examples below show history-taking and clinical decision-making.
Who is it for?
Medical schools and educators can explore institutional access. Individual medical students can explore CP OnCall for self-directed online patient simulation.
Does it replace clinical placements?
Use virtual cases alongside supervised clinical teaching, discussion and debriefing. Simulation provides practice opportunities; published research should be interpreted within its study population and design.
Published research and study limitations · Request institutional access
Online medical simulation with interactive patient cases
Virtual patient simulation is a form of computer-based medical simulation. CyberPatient gives learners a simulated clinical encounter where patient assessment and clinical decision-making form part of the same case. Educators can use these digital patient cases alongside clinical skills teaching and supervised patient care.
Emergency presentations in virtual patient cases
CyberPatient’s public case catalogue includes patients presenting to the emergency department (ER), including abdominal pain, shortness of breath and seizures. Educators exploring emergency medicine simulation can review these clinical presentations during a walkthrough and confirm which cases and workflows are available for their programme.