Simucase: Simulation-Based Medical Training

Clint Johnson, VP, Simucase

Williams further notes that when she started Simucase, it was primarily thought of as an assessment platform for faculty to track the development of students. “Soon we realized we can make it more powerful from the student side if we add a learning module,” she adds. Today, Simucase not only offers exceptional ways to gauge a student’s progress, but through interactive dashboards and real-time feedback mechanism, the platform also consistently guides students to enhance their skills. Elucidating a case in point, Williams explains how Simucase helped an SLP student improve his proficiency in diagnosing pediatric cases. Though the student was stellar in handling adult cases, he did not do well when it came to children. For such cases, Simucase offers special remediation plans to help students who need extra effort in certain areas of their study. With Simucase’s assistance, by the end of the semester, the student progressed significantly and showed a high proficiency level in managing pediatric patients.

“Used by more than 200 universities, what makes our simulations so robust is the fact that all the cases are built using real-life scenarios,” says Clint Johnson, VP of Simucase Education. After collecting the necessary information from the patient and the healthcare provider that treated the patient, Simucase builds the simulation in-house. “We also employ a rigorous review process to assess if the case exhibits evidence of best practices, and also run it through our student ambassadors who ascertain if the instructions are lucid,” adds Johnson.

Simucase believes that success follows when one makes the right choices. When the company started, simulation-led training in the communication disorder segment was relatively new. Today, the fact that simulations are included in an SLP’s clinical clock hours is a huge leap toward the acceptance of the technology. While Simucase’s current goal is to further strengthen its functions for communication disorders, in the long run, “Our goal is to create a platform that offers simulation training programs for other healthcare practices as well,” concludes Williams.