Virtual Patient Avatars | AI-Powered

Virtual patient avatars for healthcare training

Healthcare education is increasingly delivered across multiple sites, placements and digital platforms, making it harder to ensure that all learners receive consistent, high-quality communication skills training.

Virtual patient avatars are designed to solve this problem by giving every learner access to the same structured consultation experiences, regardless of location, timetable or role.

SimChat is an AI-powered simulation platform developed by the Geeky Medics team. It enables organisations to create, organise and deliver virtual patient avatar scenarios for communication skills training across courses, placement sites and departments.

What are virtual patient avatars in SimChat?

SimChat is designed for institutions and organisations that want to integrate simulation into their curriculum without relying solely on in-person simulated patients.

In SimChat, a virtual patient avatar is an AI-driven character that represents the patient during a consultation. Depending on how you configure the scenario, learners can interact with avatars through:

• Text-based chat
• Voice conversations using natural speech
• Video-based avatars that speak and display facial expressions

With SimChat, you can:

• Turn existing communication skills cases into virtual patient avatar scenarios
• Deliver simulations that feel like real consultations, whether learners are on campus or on placement
• Provide instant, personalised feedback on how learners communicate with the avatar
• Manage a central library of scenarios that can be reused, adapted and shared over time

Because scenarios are built from your own content, virtual patient avatars can follow your local guidelines, pathways and assessment frameworks rather than generic scripts.

Virtual patient avatars for communication skills

SimChat focuses on communication-focused simulations. Typical use cases for virtual patient avatars include:

• History taking: structuring consultations, using open and closed questions appropriately and identifying key red flags
• Counselling scenarios: discussing new medications, risk, lifestyle change or long-term conditions
• Difficult conversations: breaking bad news, responding to complaints and managing angry or distressed patients
• Team and interprofessional communication: handovers, escalation and multidisciplinary discussions with colleague-style avatars

Learners interact with the virtual patient avatar in real time, phrase questions in their own words and receive feedback that supports reflection and improvement.

Creating virtual patient avatar scenarios from existing materials

A common barrier to simulation is the time required to design new cases from scratch. SimChat is built to help you repurpose the materials you already use in teaching, such as:

• Patient scripts for simulated patients
• OSCE station checklists and mark schemes
• Written clinical cases or vignettes

In SimChat, you can paste or import this content, define the patient’s background and set clear learning objectives. The platform then supports you to generate a virtual patient avatar scenario in minutes.

Designing and running virtual patient avatar simulations in SimChat

Once a scenario is created, SimChat provides tools to deliver it consistently across your organisation.

Educators can:

• Store avatar-based scenarios in a tagged central library aligned to modules, themes or outcomes
• Choose whether learners interact via text, voice or video-based avatars for each scenario
• Set permissions so that only specific cohorts or groups can access a given simulation
• Share links with learners or embed access within existing virtual learning environments

Learners can complete virtual patient avatar consultations in their own time or during scheduled teaching, which makes it easier to offer repeated practice without booking additional rooms or simulated patient sessions.

Feedback and analytics from virtual patient avatars

Simulation is most effective when learners can review what happened and understand how to improve. SimChat supports this by providing:

• Consultation transcripts that learners and educators can use for self-reflection, small-group debrief or formal assessment
• Automated feedback on key aspects of communication, aligned with your criteria or rating scales
• Cohort-level analytics to show engagement, scenario completion and common areas of difficulty

Educators can also manually review each transcript and add individual comments, allowing virtual patient avatar sessions to be integrated into formative or summative assessments.