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Aquifer Preclinical Playbooks

Five ready-to-use, thoughtfully designed playbooks for integrating Aquifer clinical cases into your preclinical curriculum.

Integrating clinical cases into a preclinical curriculum takes thoughtful planning — and the Preclinical Playbooks are here to make that process more intuitive. Each of these five ready-to-use implementation patterns offers a tested approach for incorporating Aquifer cases into your coursework, allowing you to spend less time building from the ground up and more time focused on what matters most: student learning.

Each playbook represents a distinct, pedagogically-grounded approach to using clinical cases in preclinical education. Choose the pattern that best aligns with your course goals, bring it into your course builder, and tailor it to fit your own teaching style and learning objectives.

Every playbook is designed to support you from planning through reflection, and includes:

  • Setup instructions to help you get started with confidence
  • Student instructions you can share with learners right away
  • Recommended case types best suited to that particular approach
  • Monitoring guidance for understanding student engagement and outcomes as the course unfolds
  • Talking points for colleagues to help you make the case for this approach with fellow faculty or curriculum committees

Playbooks

Click the title of the playbook to access the PDF.

  1. PLAYBOOK 1: Clinical Skills / Early Clinical Exposure
    Best for: Preclinical courses that teach physical exam techniques, history-taking, or clinical communication, and want to contextualize physical exam maneuvers, build presentation skills, and provide a safe practice environment before real patients.

  2. PLAYBOOK 2: Foundational Reasoning
    Best for: Organ-system block courses that want to build illness script pattern recognition and differential diagnosis thinking early, connecting basic science to clinical presentations without management pressure.

  3. PLAYBOOK 3: Small Group / Team-based Learning
    Best for: Programs using team-based learning or small group formats that want collaborative clinical reasoning in a safe learning space, where students learn from each other’s approaches. This is a flipped classroom model: use class time for reasoning discussion rather than content delivery.

  4. PLAYBOOK 4: Bridge to Clerkship
    Best for: Programs that want to ensure foundational knowledge before the clerkship begins. This playbook will acclimate students to the Aquifer interface before clerkship intensity, reducing “new tool” friction in Year 3 when students already have established workflows.

  5. PLAYBOOK 5: High Value Care + Social Determinants of Health
    Best for: First-year doctoring or foundations courses that want to establish cost-consciousness and equity mindset early, using short modules (15–20 minutes) accessible without clinical experience. Helps meet LCME requirements.