OSCE practice without a partner: how PreceptorMD's simulated patient works

The hardest part of OSCE practice is usually finding someone to play the patient, and someone else to score you. PreceptorMD gives you both, at any hour, so you can run a station on the bus or the night before.

Starting a station

Pick one of your decks or type a topic. PreceptorMD writes a case from your slides: a patient script, an examiner's checklist and a model answer that cites the slides it is based on. The case is set in one of 48 Ghanaian care settings, from teaching hospitals to polyclinics and CHPS compounds.

You only see the door note, just as in the real exam. The case file stays hidden on the server, and the patient script is never shown.

Running it

1. Read the door note. You get preparation time before the clock starts.
2. Take the history. Type your questions. The patient answers in plain language, and only with what is in their case file, so vague questions get vague answers.
3. Watch the clock. The station is timed, like the real one.
4. Finish. End the station yourself or let the time run out.

The scorecard

At the end, PreceptorMD scores what you said against the examiner's checklist. Each item is marked covered or missed, and a covered item shows the words you used, so you can see exactly what earned the mark. Critical items, the ones an examiner would not let you miss, are marked.

Then you see the model answer, with each point citing the slide it came from, so you can go back to the lecture for anything you missed.

Getting the most out of it

• Treat it like the real station: greet the patient, introduce yourself and ask open questions first.
• Read the missed items before you start the next station, not after the fifth.
• Run the same deck twice in a week. The case changes; the checklist skills stay the same.
• Use Teach-back to explain the condition out loud after the station.

The patients are fictional and built from your study materials. Nothing in a station is real patient data, and it is practice, not assessment.