Put the patient at the forefront of the learning experience with Shadow Health®

Shadow Health Digital Clinical Experiences™ (DCE) offers high-fidelity, screen-based simulations to help nursing students build patient care skills through realistic virtual patient encounters. It features 80+ life-like, diverse Digital Standardized Patients™ who can answer millions of unique questions using a patented Conversation Engine that allows students to communicate using their own words, and content aligned with AACN Essentials competencies — with more than 700,000 nursing students currently using the platform.

Shadow Health Digital Clinical Experiences cover a comprehensive range of nursing disciplines — from Fundamentals through Advanced Primary Care — and allow students to practice patient interviews, physical examinations, EHR documentation, and therapeutic communication in a safe, simulated environment. Dynamic clinical scenarios build clinical judgment skills, while the patented Conversation Engine ensures that communication practice feels authentic rather than constrained to pre-set answer options.

Shadow Health's virtual patient population is specifically designed to reflect the diversity of real patient populations, with 80+ Digital Standardized Patients™ that vary in demographics, medical conditions, backgrounds, and social circumstances. This diversity ensures students gain experience communicating with and caring for patients from different walks of life, building the cultural competence and inclusive care skills that modern healthcare demands — and which research shows improves patient outcomes.

Shadow Health's Student Performance Index™ provides immediate, objective measurements of students' clinical reasoning abilities after each simulation encounter — tracking growth over time and giving faculty accurate data on where each student's skills are developing and where gaps remain. This precise measurement capability enables faculty to guarantee exposure to specific patient conditions and scenarios, ensure clinical reasoning development is on track, and use simulation data as a credible evidence base for programmatic assessment.

Research exploring the use of Shadow Health Digital Clinical Experiences suggests that virtual patient encounters can be used in substitution of traditional clinical hours in undergraduate nursing education, or as an enhancement to time spent in the clinical or lab space. Shadow Health DCEs are used at undergraduate and graduate levels to supplement or, where educationally justified, replace clinical hours, while ensuring all students receive consistent, measurable exposure to key clinical scenarios regardless of placement availability.