“One of the things I liked about it is they were learning about empathy and education right at the get go. I think those components of Shadow Health are really beneficial.”
Put the patient at the forefront of the learning experience with Shadow Health®
Empower students to strengthen their patient care skills with high-fidelity, screen-based simulations that feature diverse patients in a wide array of clinical scenarios across nursing disciplines.
Shadow Health is available for:
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Support undergraduate nursing students in developing their clinical reasoning skills through realistic interactions with Digital Standardized Patients™.
Graduate Students
Graduate Students
Support graduate nursing students in developing their diagnostic reasoning skills through realistic interactions with Digital Standardized Patients™.
Shadow Health supports nursing education with:
Immerse students in realistic nursing simulations
Through realistic conversation-based interactions, students communicate naturally with patients using their own words, helping them to improve critical therapeutic communication skills.
Developed locally with cultural safety in mind
Built from the ground up with a team of clinical, cultural, and educational experts across Australia and New Zealand, and aligned to the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Accreditation Council and the Nursing Council of New Zealand’s standards, Shadow Health offers a virtual environment for students to provide culturally safe care to Aboriginal and Māori patients.
Emphasis on empathy and education
Each virtual patient scenario will have specific therapeutic outcomes and students will be scored on their ability to recognise when to emphasise with the patient or educate them to close gaps in health literacy.
Simulated patient scenarios to support learning and practise-readiness
Factoring in the realities of increasingly complex healthcare environments, new nurses may experience multiple pressures as they transition to practice – from limited exposure to diverse patients and conditions, to preparedness for clinical practise and difficulties making decisions about patient care. With use cases applicable to the classroom, home, simulation lab and clinical placement environments, Shadow Health allows students to practise and apply their clinical reasoning skills through life-like interactions with a diverse cast of Australian and New Zealand virtual patients.
Explore Shadow Health
Digital Standardized Patients™
Digital Standardized Patients™
Diverse in demographics and medical conditions
Natural Language Conversation Engine
Natural Language Conversation Engine
Learners engage with patients using their own words
Patient Exam Activities
Patient Exam Activities
Learners gather assessment data and make care decisions
Student Performance Index™
Student Performance Index™
Immediate measurements of clinical reasoning abilities
Related resources
Frequently asked questions
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 Standardised 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 Standardised 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.
Learn how Shadow Health can empower your students
