Designing a scenario-based learning experience that puts patient needs, preferences, and perspectives at the center of care.
Role: Instructional Designer & Developer
Audience: Healthcare Professionals
Delivery: Interactive Self-Guided Learning Experience
Tools: Microsoft PowerPoint
Patient-centered care is easy to define, but more difficult to apply consistently in real-world situations.
The challenge was to move beyond simply presenting principles and give learners opportunities to make decisions from the patient's perspective. Learners needed to practice behaviors such as listening, communicating clearly, involving patients in decisions, and coordinating care, while seeing how their choices could affect the patient experience.
The goal was to transform patient-centered care from information learners receive into decisions they make.
I designed the course as a five-challenge quest centered on one patient's experience. Rather than progressing through traditional content slides, learners make decisions, receive consequence-based feedback, and retry when their choices don't fully support patient-centered care.
Learners begin by selecting a role: Communicator, Coordinator, or Supporter. This establishes a perspective for the experience. As they progress, they apply patient-centered care principles through scenario-based decisions, multi-selection interactions, and increasingly complex situations.
Successful decisions unlock the five pillars of patient-centered care, turning learner progress into visible evidence of demonstrated skill.
To create a true multi-selection experience in PowerPoint, I built a series of linked slide states that preserve each learner selection as additional choices are made. This allowed learners to select multiple responses, see their choices persist visually, and submit a completed combination, creating an interaction that behaves more like an eLearning authoring tool than a traditional slide deck.
I used the same branching approach throughout the experience to create role selection, consequence-based feedback, reties, persistent progress indicators, and unlockable achievements.
The completed experience transforms patient-centered care from a set of principles into decisions that learners actively practice. Across five challenges, learners navigate realistic patient situations, receive immediate consequence-based feedback, retry decisions when needed, and progressively unlock five pillars of patient-centered care.
The result is a fully interactive, self-guided learning experience built entirely in PowerPoint, demonstrating how instructional design can turn a familiar presentation tool into an engaging scenario-based learning environment.
