The Use of a Digital Clinical Experience in Advanced Health Assessment

Nurse practitioner (NP) students today are different from past generations. Millennials (age 18-29) are highly collaborative and thrive using advanced technology. They learn best by doing, utilizing simulations, and they request immediate feedback. To prepare competent NPs, educators must accurately assess the learning styles and needs of their students. Health Assessment is a core course and an integral component of correct disease diagnosis. To meet the changing needs of our students, the faculty of Alcorn State University implemented a digital clinical experience (DCE), called Shadow Health, into the Health Assessment course. The DCE utilizes several strategies to promote student learning, including engaging students, experiential learning, and critical inquiry. The DCE provides students with a dynamic, immersive experience designed to enrich instruction through the clinical examination of a digital standardized patient. In addition to replicating a clinical experience, the DCE increases student engagement, provides opportunities for reflection in the development of clinical reasoning skills, and it provides immediate feedback of performance. The DCE is made up of 9 modules with the same client, Tina Jones. She breathes, speaks, and has a complex set of medical and psychosocial histories. Tina understands over 20,000 questions and can respond with more than 1,000 unique answers. Students progressively work though each module completing assignments. At the completion of all 9 modules, the student has obtained a health history, performed a head to toe assessment, and developed a treatment plan for Tina. Student learning is assessed by evaluating module data, clinical findings (both discovered and missed), focus notes, self-reflections and exam transcripts. By providing a realistic DCE where students can strengthen essential clinical competencies and develop sound clinical reasoning, the faculty has transparency into student learning. This allows faculty to reflect on how to improve their teaching by evaluating the student’s interaction with the DCE. Faculty has access to student data such as verbatim transcripts, clinical findings, self-reflections as well as the faculty executive summary. How to improve teaching is evaluated and documented by each faculty individually.