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 build their next-generation DIGYMOS platform - an AI tool providing emotionally intelligent virtual patients for healthcare education. The platform is built on AWS and uses generative AI to simulate realistic, emotionally responsive patient interactions. Customer response since launch has been excellent. The innovation directly 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 the proof of concept that would become DIGYMOS 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.

DIGYMOS guides educators and learners through a four-step workflow designed for both ease of use and clinical rigor. Instructors begin by building virtual patients with detailed demographics, personality traits, and rich background histories. They then define cases by setting assessment criteria, medical conditions, must-ask questions, and full clinical scenarios including labs and diagnosis. From there, students engage in natural, open-ended conversations with responsive virtual patients rather than selecting from multiple-choice prompts. Finally, detailed analytics on performance and competencies are automatically generated for instructors and program administrators.

The technical solution addressed BreakAway Games' core challenge of creating AI that maintains medical accuracy while exhibiting believably human behavior. DIGYMOS virtual patients exhibit dynamic personality states and natural traits that emerge organically from interactions. Patients become more open with good questioning, defensive with insensitive approaches, confused by technical jargon, and engaged when rapport is established. Aggressiveness surfaces when rapport is low, vulnerability when empathy is lacking, and charm when the learner connects well. Mission's team worked closely with BreakAway Games to implement prompting strategies that enabled this behavior, carefully calibrating the AI's inherent tendency toward perfect comprehension against the need to simulate real patient confusion and imperfect articulation of symptoms.

DIGYMOS was also built to meet the rigorous technical demands of enterprise healthcare and government clients. The platform runs on HIPAA-compliant, AWS-hosted infrastructure with secure data handling, access controls, and 99.9% uptime. It is WCAG compliant with universal design principles and support for multiple languages to serve diverse populations. RESTful API, XAPI, and SCORM support enable flexible deployment across learning management systems and credentialing platforms.

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 an initial set of approximately 24 virtual patients with different medical conditions for validation by subject matter experts, and is designed to scale rapidly from there. The system enables rapid customization of virtual patients to match specific curriculum requirements and medical scenarios, positioning BreakAway Games to serve multiple clients with tailored patient scenarios while maintaining a scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure.

The DIGYMOS platform has been met with excellent customer response and transforms healthcare professional training for learners, programs, and patients alike.

For healthcare students and certificants, DIGYMOS delivers measurable gains in communication skills, empathy, diagnostic reasoning, and cultural competency through practice with diverse, realistic patient archetypes. Healthcare students and professionals can now access high-quality patient interactions 24/7, removing the geographic and scheduling barriers that previously limited training opportunities.

For training programs and institutions, DIGYMOS provides objective performance data and standardized assessment at a fraction of the cost of physical simulation centers. The platform eliminates the need for students to travel hundreds of miles to simulation centers or schedule appointments months in advance. Organizations can rapidly create custom virtual patients addressing specific diagnostic challenges or curriculum gaps in days rather than weeks or months. This directly supports nurses preparing for NCLEX examinations and professionals meeting continuing education requirements, a critical need given the high attrition rates nurses face in their first year on the job. The return on investment becomes clear when considering the eliminated costs of physical simulation centers, standardized patient actors, and travel requirements, enabling institutions to scale training programs without proportional increases in infrastructure spending.

For patients in real clinical settings, the downstream benefit is better-prepared professionals who communicate more clearly and deliver more empathetic care.

The success of this initial DIGYMOS implementation opens pathways for future applications, including direct patient support tools. The original mandate from a decade ago to create avatars for PTSD patients who preferred not to visit healthcare professionals in person has now evolved into hyper-realistic healthcare training modules through DIGYMOS. 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.