"It Talks Like a Patient, But Feels Different": Co-Designing AI Standardized Patients with Medical Learners
For medical educators and AI designers, this work provides learner-driven design requirements to improve AI-SPs for clinical communication training.
Medical students find that LLM-based AI standardized patients (AI-SPs) talk like patients but feel different. Through interviews and co-design workshops, the study identifies six learner-centered needs and design requirements, showing that instructional usability, not just conversational realism, drives trust and educational value.
Standardized patients (SPs) play a central role in clinical communication training but are costly, difficult to scale, and inconsistent. Large language model (LLM) based AI standardized patients (AI-SPs) promise flexible, on-demand practice, yet learners often report that they talk like a patient but feel different. We interviewed 12 clinical-year medical students and conducted three co-design workshops to examine how learners experience constraints of SP encounters and what they expect from AI-SPs. We identified six learner-centered needs, translated them into AI-SP design requirements, and synthesized a conceptual workflow. Our findings position AI-SPs as tools for deliberate practice and show that instructional usability, rather than conversational realism alone, drives learner trust, engagement, and educational value.