One of the hardest parts of health professions education is getting enough meaningful practice with real patients, across a wide enough range of conditions, ages, and care settings. With our latest release, we now offer 23 Virtual Patient Encounters (VPEs) designed to mirror that real-world breadth, while also giving learners something traditional clinical exposure rarely can: consistent, personalized feedback on their performance.
Our VPE library now spans the full spectrum of care: inpatient and outpatient settings; pediatrics, adult medicine, and geriatrics; and primary care, neurology, psychiatry, gynecology, obstetrics, and emergency presentations. These VPEs live within cases built to feel like real encounters—with evolving histories, branching decisions, and clinically rich details—so practicing with Aquifer doesn’t feel like “doing modules,” it feels like taking care of patients.
As the catalog grows, so does the complexity and nuance of scenarios. Learners can practice:
Focused history-taking for acute complaints (e.g., chest pain, abdominal pain, dizziness, headache)
Patient interviewing skills, including eliciting and clarifying a chief complaint; collecting information relevant to the presenting problem; effective questioning techniques; building rapport; and more
Application of medical knowledge across clinical disciplines as they adjust their questioning based on their understanding of the science
*NEW* — Delivering bad news to patients
This breadth is intentional. Clinical practice is dynamic and unpredictable; an educational platform meant to prepare students for that reality should be, too.
With this release, we’re especially excited to add our first communication-focused VPE centered on delivering bad news: a 65-year-old hospitalized patient with newly diagnosed squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. Breaking bad news is one of the most emotionally and professionally challenging skills in medicine, yet most learners get only a handful of real-life attempts—often with limited supervision, variable feedback, and high stakes for patients and families.
With this new offering, learners can rehearse this difficult conversation in a psychologically safe environment. They must communicate the diagnosis clearly and compassionately, respond to emotions in real time, and address questions about prognosis and next steps. Instead of a one-off role-play, they get structured, individualized feedback: where they did well, what they missed, and how they can improve in future encounters.
It’s not enough to simply say the right words; we help learners understand how those words land, and how to adjust in the moment.
Across all 23 VPEs, personalized feedback is a central design principle. Each encounter is built to capture learner behavior—what questions they ask, how they prioritize their differential diagnosis, how they counsel, and how they respond to red flags or emotional cues. The platform then transforms that performance into personalized, trustworthy, and actionable feedback.
Instead of vague comments like “ask more open-ended questions,” students see concrete examples tied to their own encounter. They can compare their approach to expert reasoning, identify specific missed opportunities, and repeat the case to see improvement over time. For educators, this means they can scale high-quality, individualized feedback across an entire cohort, without needing to be present for every single encounter.
We believe credibility with educators comes from building high-quality simulations, which requires realistic patients and useful feedback. The expanding VPE catalog is built and vetted with those goals in mind. The cases reflect the messy, varied reality of clinical practice; the feedback is designed to be as thoughtful and specific as what a great preceptor might say after watching a student with a patient. Plus, our VPEs are built with the same commitment to responsible AI development and use that we have made for all of our AI features.
Reaching 23 virtual patient encounters is an important milestone—but it’s also just a step toward a broader vision: a dynamic, ever-growing set of encounters that help learners practice not only what they know, but how they show up for patients, families, and colleagues.
If you’re teaching with Aquifer, those are the skills we want your students to walk away with, so they build confidence grounded in practice, based on feedback that feels (and is) personal, specific, and worthy of their time.