“Aquifer does a great job of curating the most important concepts for us to learn and seamlessly weaving them into realistic cases. Before I saw patients on the wards, Aquifer’s virtual patients gave me enough clinical context to remember the highest yield points to present to my attending. This is the way to learn "bread-and-butter" medicine! ”
Fourth-Year Medical Student
Join more than 300,000 students who completed over 10,000,000 virtual cases from Aquifer since our founding in 2006.
The Aquifer Virtual Case Experience
Developing Clinical Reasoning Skills
All clinical rotations are not created equal. Experiences vary based on a student’s location, time of year, patients, preceptors, and program structure. Aquifer helps to even the playing field—providing access to a consistent student experience that overcomes these challenges. Our courses fill educational gaps with realistic cases that tie directly to key content and national standards, helping institutions meet accreditation requirements and providing students with a well-rounded education.
We’re committed to preparing students for clinical practice. Each of our cases presents a virtual patient encounter, modeling preceptor interactions and demonstrating best-practices—with a multimedia experience and access to deep resource material. Case content focuses on teaching evidence-based decision making, and developing the problem-solving skills vital to providing quality patient care.
In each Aquifer virtual case, students will work through the process of:
- Eliciting the chief complaint
- Taking a history
- Performing a physical exam
- Writing a summary statement
- Formulating a differential diagnosis
- Diagnostic testing
- Ongoing patient management
An Interactive Student Experience in Each Case
- Embedded assessment questions keep learners engaged by testing knowledge and providing in-depth answer explanations.
- The clinical reasoning toolbar helps students to track their findings and develop a differential diagnosis.
- Dialog boxes with click and reveal text provide a model for effective patient communication.
- Expert comments and full references give access to source material for deeper learning.
- Multimedia integration with images, video, audio, and infographics support realistic clinical experiences.
- Printable Case Summaries provide key learning points and expert comments to keep as a reference after completing the case.
- Track your progress through the cases with student reporting.
- Some courses come with Self-Assessment Questions, which ask students to apply skills and content knowledge to new case scenarios. Each question includes answers and the associated clinical reasoning.