Introduction to Clinical Dentistry and Pediatric Dentistry Clinic I (Dentistry)

Team members

Dr. M. Jimena Montenegro Avila, Dr. Sandra Hola Jacob, Dr. Karla Moscoso, and Dr. Leonardo Gonzalez Escobar from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.

Programs/courses

Introduction to Clinical Dentistry course, Pediatric Dentistry Clinic I course (Dentistry)

How have you used Clinical Mind AI in your teaching or research?

Clinical Mind AI was implemented in two courses at the Dentistry program, in different but complementary educational contexts: from introductory-level learning to a first introduction to the clinical setting, as well as from introductory-level learning to clinical practice.

Introduction to Clinical Dentistry course (2nd year, 64 students)

This course marks students’ first approach to patient interviews and clinical reasoning. In this context, most students have never conducted a real medical history interview and count only with theoretical knowledge of the communication tools needed to interact with patients and/or their companions. The activity with Clinical Mind AI was designed as a practice sesión prior to observational clinical rotations, where students are to observe how of 5th- and 6th-year clinical students develop dentist-patient communication and engagement. Conducting the exercise with simulated patients as preparation allowed students to become familiar with the structure of the clinical interview in a safe environment so that they could critically observe the clinical interactions of 5th- and 6th-year students in a real-world context.

Two simulated clinical cases were created in adult patients; both consulting common dental issues in primary care. 64 students accessed the platform individually over a one-week period, with the instruction to conduct at least one complete interview prior to the feedback session. The activity was self-directed, without real-time supervision, allowing each student to repeat the interaction as many times as necessary. Upon completion, the platform generated automatic feedback based on the International University of Health and Welfare’s medical history-taking skills rubric. This rubric aims to assess clinical interview skills in undergraduate dental students. Reference: Oshimi, T. (2024). Developing a clinician-friendly rubric for assessing history-taking skills in medical undergraduates speaking English as a foreign language. Meded. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10610376 

Pediatric Dentistry Clinic I course (4th year, 69 students)

This clinical course is designed for fourth-year students who are at the first stages of treatment for pediatric patients. The specific challenge was to train students in the parent´s interview, because most of the patients are minors and they cannot provide clinical information on their own, it is essential to develop the ability to obtain a complete medical history through parents or caregivers in order to generate a medical history, diagnosis, and treatment plan with a risk-based approach.

For this course, a clinical case was designed in which the simulated tutor was the 4-year-and-3-month-old patient’s mother who was seeking a preventive dental checkup. The mother was programmed on the platform with a realistic behavioral profile: she used everyday language, provided some information spontaneously, but withheld other details until the student asked specific questions, and displayed varying levels of anxiety while the interview progressed, as she held personal dental beliefs and experiences that she did not want to pass on to her daughter. The 69 students carried out the activity in an auditorium as part of their preparation for collecting relevant clinical information from real pediatric patients and the subsequent creation of medical records and treatment planning. The activity was structured in three stages: an open-ended interview with the simulated parent, evaluation of the activity by the teaching team, and a subsequent group discussion where the most frequent errors and strategies for improvement were analyzed.

What impact or benefits have you observed for your students or teaching practice?

The observed benefits varied depending on the context of each course, but in both cases the impact was significant for reducing anxiety when facing real patients and developing competencies through new clinical tutorial teaching tools.

In Introduction to Clinical Dentistry course, the main benefit was the reduction of anxiety associated with the first clinical encounter. Students arrived at the in-person sessions with a more concrete understanding of how dental interviews are structured, what questions to ask (open-ended/closed-ended), and how to handle silences or unexpected responses from the patient. The opportunity to repeat the interaction without real consequences on patients was positively valued by the students themselves.

The ability to repeat the interaction without consequences was viewed positively by the students themselves, who reported feeling better prepared compared to previous cohorts that did not have access to this tool. From the faculty’s perspective, Clinical Mind AI allowed students to gain initial hands-on experience in a controlled environment, enabling them to practically understand the basic structure of the medical history and thus better grasp how to gather relevant information to formulate a sound diagnosis without exposing real patients to a process that could raise the uncertainty inherent in this initial learning phase.

At Pediatric Dentistry Clinic I course, the implementation of Clinical Mind AI revealed concrete benefits in both the students’ learning process and the organization of teaching.

One of the most evident impacts was the development of the ability to conduct a structured and comprehensive medical history in a pediatric setting. By working in pairs during the first hour of the workshop, students had to coordinate the interview with the simulated patient, assign roles, and make joint decisions about which questions to ask in order to obtain the necessary information. This promoted not only individual clinical reasoning but also collaborative work and peer communication—essential skills in real-world clinical practice.

The use of the clinical record template as a concrete product of the activity was a particularly valuable element. By having to transfer the information obtained in the simulated interview to a formal medical record, students faced the same challenge they will encounter in real practice: identifying what information is clinically relevant, how to organize it, and how to document it correctly. This allowed the activity to transcend the level of conversation and be directly anchored in a specific professional competency.

Another significant benefit was the ability to review documents and images attached to the case within the platform, which enriched the experience and made it more realistic in terms of the complexity of a real pediatric consultation, where the clinician must integrate verbal, visual, and documentary information simultaneously.

From the teaching perspective, the final hour of debriefing in the auditorium by the teaching team proved particularly effective. By collectively comparing the completed forms with the correct case information, it was possible to identify the most frequent errors, the questions students typically omit, and the difficulties in interpreting certain clinical data. This turned the grading process into an instance of active learning rather than just assessment, and provided the teaching team with valuable information about the group’s learning gaps.

Overall, the platform served as a valuable tool for expanding access to early simulated clinical practice, and allowed 133 students to practice interview skills independently, repeatedly, with immediate feedback, and at a lower cost, compared with activities with trained patients—all aspects that are difficult to guarantee given the limited number of patients available in a traditional clinical setting.

Anything else you’d like to share about your experience?

Faculty members from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile—Dr. M. Jimena Montenegro Avila, Dr. Sandra Hola Jacob, Dr. Karla Moscoso, and Dr. Leonardo Gonzalez Escobar—participated in the simulated patient activity using the Clinical Mind AI platform.