Virtual Hospital, Real-World Impact: How Faculty Are Reimagining Health Education
Thanks to an off-the-cuff remark, a highly specialized teaching tool has blossomed into a comprehensive and vibrant health care system.
Rebecca Brody, professor and Jason Stevens, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Preventative Nutrition Sciences at Rutgers School of Health Professions (SHP) developed an AI-driven hospital simulation for their course on leadership and change. The simulation allowed students to practice handling leadership and change management scenarios by interacting with a variety of characters in the virtual hospital.
Stevens was inspired by his video gaming hobby, wondering if the role play and simulation elements of certain games could be adopted as a teaching tool. He built out the initial simulator and taught Brody how to build the characters that populated the hospital.
“The simulation was working really well, and I presented it to faculty during our faculty retreat,” remembered Brody. “Many of them wanted to get involved, but I realized that it was very narrowly focused on nutrition.”
And then, she mused out loud about the potential of expanding the simulation for the rest of the School of Health professions to use, unwittingly committing her summer to building out that larger application with Stevens.
What resulted was the Rutgers Health Virtual Health Care Simulator (VHS), a detailed virtual health care system based on Newark and its surrounding communities. The environment includes multiple hospitals, a research center, and inpatient and outpatient facilities as well as nearly 35 characters in the roles of students, patients, leaders, administrators, and clinicians.
The VHS ecosystem allows students to experience the full continuum of academic health care delivery while exploring health equity, urban health disparities, and interprofessional collaboration.
Using ChatGPT, Brody and Stevens developed two custom GPT models. One faculty-facing model to assist in creating teaching scenarios, and the other a chat bot to run students through the scenarios.
The faculty model builds scenarios by prompting faculty for ideas on what they want to build into the virtual health system. Faculty specify roles, scenarios, or competencies to assess, and can even upload their course syllabus for additional data. The model then pulls from the system’s characters and creates the learning experience in a setting within the existing hospital situation, providing details about how the activity should run.
Faculty then take that output and enter it into the student-facing chat bot. After a student participates in the scenario, faculty can prompt the system to provide feedback based on their rubrics or desired competencies.
Said Brody, “We’re not using AI to replace our courses. We have clear objectives as to what we want to teach, and we’re leveraging the AI to help support those learning outcomes.”
She initiated a pilot study through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) lab, initially enrolling 15 faculty members who utilized the simulator in their courses this fall. The group represents most departments across SHP and meets every other week to update each other on their progress. They are currently working on their first manuscript.
“I honestly expected this to be a small project, but it’s grown into a really exciting opportunity for faculty to collaborate,” Brody reflected. “We’ve expanding to more faculty in the spring, and we’re working to secure funding to build out the infrastructure even further.”
She hopes to continue expanding the applications of the simulator to eventually do more interprofessional collaboration between SHP departments and Rutgers Health at large. Her ultimate goal is to build a standalone platform outside of ChatGPT, and begin conducting interprofessional research to contribute to the pedagogy of using AI-based role play and simulation to improve student outcomes.
Almost as if a nod to the faculty retreat that led to the expanded platform, Brody can’t help but muse out loud about the further potential of the simulator.
“With the right funding and growth, I can envision licensing and packaging this to share with other universities,” she concluded. “Rutgers could be known as a go-to for experiential learning using AI simulations. That would be fantastic.”
By Chris Burton