Escaping the classroom: preparing health students for the realities of digital care

Modern healthcare is being transformed by digital technologies — yet health professions education has been slow to keep pace. Students learn about interprofessional collaboration in classrooms, but rarely experience it in the dynamic, tech-enabled environments they are entering.

At the same time, more than 70% of digital transformations in healthcare fail — not because of the technology itself, but due to failures in innovation management, information systems, and the human factors that shape how teams work together. Preparing the next generation of health professionals means giving them authentic, hands-on experience with exactly these challenges.

The BLISs (Blended Learning Interactive Simulation suite) capability at the Centre's clinical simulation lab enables a new kind of learning experience: immersive, gamified escape room simulations set in realistic digital health environments. Students from medicine, nursing, allied health, biomedical engineering, informatics, and IT step into interdisciplinary teams to tackle real-world scenarios — AI failures, data breaches, virtual ED blackouts, pandemic response. Life-sized touchscreen dashboards and immersive audio-visual projections transform the suite into a living, breathing hospital environment.

Funded through the University of Melbourne's Learning and Teaching Initiatives grant, this project is designed to reach 600+ students annually across health and engineering faculties. Students gain hands-on experience with real-world digital health tools — AI decision support, electronic medical records, wearables, clinical dashboards — while building interprofessional teamwork, digital health literacy, ethical reasoning, and decision-making confidence. A co-designed scenario library, facilitator guide, and open-access simulation toolkit will make the model adaptable across faculties and institutions. The result is an evidence-informed approach to digital health education — one that other faculties and institutions can adopt and build on.

Want to pilot this approach in your curriculum or research program? Get in touch with the team at the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health to discuss a collaboration or book a tour of the BLISs.