Original article written by Mirko Hirschmann and published on Tau20. Below is an extract of the article.

Assessing the impact potential of AI role-play simulations in healthcare and social services

Communication is one of the most important capabilities, yet hardest to scale, in healthcare and social services. When communication breaks down, patients and service users suffer, staff face higher emotional strain, and organizations carry the costs of errors, sick leave, turnover, and repeated training. The patient-safety literature has long treated communication failures as a major contributor to serious adverse events.

Variment’s AI-powered role plays allow learners to practise difficult conversations, receive structured feedback, and improve empathy and interpersonal communication in a safe training environment.

The key question for us is: how can this strong social-impact potential be translated into measurable impact evidence that investors, public funders, and institutional customers can rely on?

With the help of the Impact Readiness Sprint programme organized by Tau20 in partnership with EBAN (European Business Angel Network) and the EU-funded Clarifai project, we identified the following trackable metrics:

– Health and care workers trained: Number of healthcare and social-service professionals, students, or staff completing Variment simulations. Variment already links this to IRIS+ OI4229 and targets 2,000 learners trained by 2027. IRIS+ is a framework to measure impact.

– Training hours delivered: Total hours of simulation-based communication training completed. Variment targets 4,000 training hours by 2027.

– User satisfaction and recommendation rate: Share of users recommending the training or rating it as useful; Variment targets more than 80%.

– Communication confidence improvement: Pre/post change in self-rated confidence in difficult conversations, empathy, or patient/service-user interactions.

– Communication skills improvement: Assessment-based or rubric-based change in communication quality after simulations.

– Organizational outcomes: Where customers can provide data, track changes in training time, onboarding costs, sick leave, turnover, incident reports, or complaint rates.

– Equity and cultural fit: Number and share of customized simulations reflecting local language, role context, and cultural norms.

Impact potential

The most relevant impact pathways are improved care quality, stronger communication and empathy, better preparedness for difficult conversations, and potentially lower training costs, sick leave, turnover, incidents, or complaints where customer data allow these outcomes to be tracked. In practical impact terms, 150,000-400,000 workers trained would translate into approximately 300,000-800,000 training hours if each learner completes around two hours of role-play simulation.

For Norway specifically, a realistic national at-scale scenario would be around 15,000-35,000 health and social-care workers trained by 2030, equivalent to roughly 30,000-70,000 training hours if each learner completes about two hours of simulation training.

For Variment, the next evidence step is clear: continue collecting user-level learning outcomes, add pre/post measures where possible, and work with pilot customers to connect simulation training to organizational outcomes such as training efficiency, staff confidence, patient/service-user experience, and avoidable communication-related incidents.

Want to work with us to create a positive impact on health and social care training? Contact us for a free demo.