As healthcare education continues to evolve, many nurse practitioner programs are exploring how technology can support clinical reasoning and simulation-based learning. At Missouri Baptist University, Dr. Bryanna Scherer— an adult geriatric nurse practitioner and simulation coordinator for the graduate nursing program — has helped integrate AI-powered clinical cases into the curriculum to support student learning in a fully online environment.
In the following conversation, Dr. Scherer shares how simulation tools are helping faculty bridge the gap between didactic coursework and real-world clinical decision-making, while also giving educators greater visibility into how students think through patient cases.
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I am Doctor Bryanna Scherer, and I am an adult geriatric nurse practitioner. I teach in the MSN program at Missouri Baptist University, and I serve as our simulation coordinator for our graduate program.
I lead the charge in integrating simulation across our curriculum and all of our NP tracks, as well as our nurse educator and nurse leadership tracks.
Our program at Missouri Baptist University is completely online and asynchronous, and so simulation really helps us as faculty be able to bridge the gap and see truly how students are applying what they're learning in their didactic courses in simulated cases.
What we're looking for with simulation is a program that allows students to have that immersive experience with a patient, just as they would get in the practicum setting. That means getting the patient history, performing the physical exam, identifying differential diagnoses, and working through their evaluation and management plan.
What we love about Sketchy is that Sketchy leverages AI in a way that makes the learning engaging for students because they're getting adaptive feedback in the moment as they're working through the case.
What we've seen as faculty is that it almost combats AI use by using AI. Each step is set up very sequentially in a way that really forces students to engage with the material and reevaluate their differential diagnoses throughout the whole process.
Many of our students choose to work through the case a second time to really solidify that learning, and that speaks volumes to how much they enjoy working through those cases and having DDx implemented into their curriculum.
DDx does a great job of revealing different knowledge gaps and areas of growth for students because we are able to see their thinking patterns and their thought processes as they work through the cases. Students are also able to look back and see that themselves.
They’re able to tap into the metacognition aspect of learning and really solidify what their takeaways are from each case.
As faculty, we’re able to get a glimpse of where students are and then target areas where we can help them grow, as well as identify where they are meeting benchmarks and where they might need additional support.
At the end of a case, I can pull up all of the data and see the most commonly missed areas. For example, I can see if students struggled with the history portion of the case or the physical exam portion.
That gives me really great data to know where I need to tailor additional education to help fill those gaps.
DDx has made it much easier on me as a simulation coordinator when delivering active learning strategies to our students because the cases are already built by experts in the field.
There are hundreds of cases to choose from, and you can easily navigate and filter through them based on the setting of the case, the type of case, or the body system you're looking for. This makes it really easy to pick which cases align with the course content for that week.
We’re also able to customize those cases to the level of the learner.
If I have a student who is in the first semester of their program and I don’t want them working through differential diagnoses yet, we can truncate those cases so they’re only working through the portions of the case that I want them to as the educator.
Then they can return to that same case later in the program and work through the full case with differentials and management. It almost becomes an unfolding case as they move throughout the program.
I’ve also been able to use the creation tool to develop cases myself that I’ve submitted to Sketchy and added to our institutional library. These were cases that didn’t already exist but that I wanted my students to work through.
As faculty, the support I’ve received from the DDx team — from our sales representative to the implementation support team and tech support team — has made the implementation and initial phases really a fantastic and seamless experience.
I would highly recommend NP programs consider implementing DDx into their curriculum, whether they’re asynchronous or synchronous.
It’s been a phenomenal experience for us as faculty, but also for our students. We’ve really been able to see the growth in their clinical reasoning and clinical judgment as they work through these cases.
