Examining the Use of a Digital Clinical Patient in the Online Classroom Environment

Background: While there are a number of instructional products designed to educate undergraduate nursing students, the quality of these products vary, and there is a shortage of quality products that can be used for advanced practice graduate nursing students. To address this need, Shadow Health™ introduced a new and innovative Digital Clinical Experience™ (DCE) in 2012. The DCE is a 28 year old African-American female named Tina Jones. As faculty, I utilize Tina Jones in a fully-online advanced health assessment course. In order to prepare students for the valuable time they spend face-to-face in resource-intensive clinical laboratories, faculty must provide opportunities online for their students to learn and reinforce the knowledge necessary to effectively apply advanced health assessment skills and techniques and further develop diagnostic reasoning and skills. 

The purpose of this presentation is to present student perceptions of digital standardized examinations and to explore relationships between student use of a digital patient with learning styles.

Results: Student learning styles* were assessed prior to course with 70 % Visual, 30% Auditory, and 50% Kinesthetic (*Percentages exceed 100% r/t multiple learning styles).   Feedback from students prior to DCE was positive, with some concerns related to lack of experience and new technology. Three themes obtained post-DCE included a more comprehensive understanding of content, practice in questioning and collecting history, and improved feedback with documentation.

Discussion: This presentation will relate the issue of technologies with online education to all disciplines and will identify  innovative teaching strategies to use with such challenges.