Secondary Collaborators
Daniel Weisman
Ken Lay
Warren Scott Comulada
Creating AI Simulations to Practice Communication Skills
The goal of this project is to introduce health professions educators, clinicians, and medical and nursing students to the practical and ethical use of large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools in education and clinical training. Through a series of interdisciplinary workshops held at the UCLA Simulation Center and online, participants will explore how AI tools can bolster teaching, assist with simulation scenario design, and improve learner engagement across various healthcare education contexts.
Workshops will provide foundational knowledge on how generative AI LLMs (such as ChatGPT) function, with emphasis on limitations, risks, and opportunities in simulation-based healthcare education. Participants will receive training on core AI competencies such as prompt engineering, data privacy, algorithmic bias, model reliability, and strategies for mitigating risks associated with LLMs. The workshop will also feature practical applications of LLMs to create simulations, including development of AI-powered virtual simulated patients, communication skills training scenarios, and AI-generated performance feedback systems.
A multidisciplinary team of clinical educators, simulation specialists, standardized patients, and an instructional designer will facilitate the workshop and develop learning content based on the existing course design for our Simulation Instructor Course. We will also draw on insights from our ongoing research—including AI virtual patients for delivering difficult news, de-escalation for patients with substance use disorders, and faculty development modules for simulation debriefing—to inform creation of new communication-focused AI training tools. Exploring the design and development process for existing simulations will provide foundational understanding of how generative AI systems function, how to craft effective prompts, and how to evaluate the reliability and appropriateness of AI-generated outputs and conversations.
The project will build an interdisciplinary cohort of educators and clinicians equipped to critically and creatively integrate AI into their teaching. It will result in a set of AI-informed teaching resources, ethical use guidelines, and a library of new AI simulation scenarios to establish a sustainable model for faculty development in emerging educational technologies. This pilot directly supports UCLA’s strategic goals to elevate how we teach, foster innovation, and promote ethical, inclusive, and future-ready pedagogy in the health sciences.