Training Tomorrow's Healthcare Professionals: How Mission Helped BreakAway Games Revolutionize AI Virtual Patients

BreakAway Games, a games developer focused on education and training, partnered with Mission to create next-generation virtual patients for healthcare professional training. Through Mission's AWS expertise and development capabilities, BreakAway Games built an innovative proof of concept using generative AI to simulate realistic patient interactions. This groundbreaking solution addresses the critical shortage of standardized patients, providing 24/7 access to high-quality training tools for medical students, nurses, and healthcare professionals preparing for board examinations, meeting continuing education requirements, and keeping skills relevant.

BreakAway Games develops video games that are utilized for education, training, and assessment in various industries, including healthcare, defense, government, and others. The industry term for these types of games is “serious games.” The company leverages gaming technology to deliver engaging learning experiences across healthcare and government sectors, with a particular focus on healthcare professional training and military applications spanning over two decades of development work.

BreakAway Games saw opportunities to improve its previous generation of virtual patients for healthcare professionals. The company needed to modernize its approach by utilizing generative AI to create patient simulations that accurately portrayed real-world interactions and supported the growing demand for accessible healthcare training.

AWS introduced BreakAway Games to Mission as a trusted partner with deep expertise in generative AI and AWS services. The recommendation highlighted Mission's technical capabilities and understanding of user-centered design principles. BreakAway Games, which primarily handles development in-house, rarely works with external development partners but found Mission's approach compelling. The team demonstrated strong software development practices and Agile methodology that set a benchmark for BreakAway Games' internal processes. Mission's ability to balance technical excellence with user experience design proved particularly valuable for a project requiring both AI sophistication and practical application in healthcare training environments.

BreakAway Games selected AWS as its cloud platform based on years of experience with multiple cloud providers. The platform's ubiquity, ease of use, and comprehensive service offerings made it the clear choice. AWS proved particularly valuable for accommodating the diverse technical requirements imposed by BreakAway Games' large enterprise clients across government and commercial sectors. AWS Bedrock provided the generative AI capabilities needed for creating sophisticated virtual patients with personality and medical accuracy.

Mission built a proof of concept virtual patient system on AWS infrastructure, leveraging Amazon Bedrock as the foundation for generative AI capabilities. The architecture incorporated AWS Lambda for serverless computing, enabling efficient scaling and resource management. The team designed the system with flexibility in mind, making it simple to swap between different AI models available through Amazon Bedrock to optimize performance and cost.

The technical solution addressed BreakAway Games' unique challenge of creating AI that maintains medical accuracy while exhibiting realistic patient behavior. Mission's team worked closely with BreakAway Games to implement prompting strategies that allowed virtual patients to respond authentically, including limited health literacy, varied language fluency, and natural communication patterns. This required careful calibration to balance the AI's inherent tendency toward perfect comprehension with the need to simulate real patient confusion and imperfect articulation of symptoms.

The development process exemplified best practices in Agile methodology, with clear progress tracking and regular communication. Mission's professional approach to software development provided a model for BreakAway Games' internal team. The architecture supports the creation of an initial set of approximately 24 virtual patients with different medical conditions for initial validation by subject matter experts.

The system enables rapid customization of virtual patients to match specific curriculum requirements and medical scenarios. This capability addresses a critical need in healthcare education where training must adapt quickly to address specific skill gaps or emerging medical needs. The platform's design positions BreakAway Games to serve multiple clients with tailored patient scenarios while maintaining a scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure.

The partnership with Mission produced a functional proof of concept that transforms healthcare professional training. The system creates virtual patients with rich backstories, responsiveness to empathetic attitudes, and realistic communication patterns that go far beyond previous generations of medical training simulations. Healthcare students and professionals can now access high-quality patient interactions 24/7, removing geographic and scheduling barriers that previously limited training and practice opportunities.

The solution directly addresses critical pain points in medical education. Nurses face particularly high attrition rates, with most not completing their first year on the job. The virtual patient system provides targeted preparation for medical boards, NCLEX examinations, and continuing education requirements. By making standardized patient training available on demand, the platform eliminates the need for students to travel hundreds of miles to simulation centers or schedule appointments months in advance.

The return on investment for healthcare institutions becomes clear when considering the eliminated costs of physical simulation centers, standardized patient actors, and travel requirements. The platform enables institutions to scale training programs without proportional increases in infrastructure spending. Organizations can rapidly create custom virtual patients addressing specific diagnostic challenges or curriculum needs, responding to training gaps in days rather than weeks or months.

BreakAway Games plans to showcase the solution on the road, targeting rollout to more customers. The success of this initial implementation opens pathways for future applications, including direct patient support tools. The original mandate from a decade ago—creating avatars for PTSD patients who preferred not to visit healthcare professionals in person—has now evolved into hyper-realistic healthcare training modules thanks to modern generative AI capabilities. The platform positions BreakAway Games to expand beyond training healthcare professionals into direct patient care applications, addressing mental health needs and medical condition management through accessible virtual interactions.