From the Brand You Trust

NEJM Healer is a product of NEJM Group—the world’s most trusted and influential source for gold-standard medical research and education—a division of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine.

You can be assured that the material and assessment tools in NEJM Healer are accurate, objective, pedagogically sound, and developed with the same editorial rigor as all NEJM Group products.

The Inspiration Behind NEJM Healer

Clinical reasoning is a key factor in obtaining positive patient outcomes and is much more challenging to teach and assess than basic skills or clinical knowledge. Development of clinical reasoning skills requires deliberate practice and focused repetitive actions with feedback to calibrate performance and drive expertise. In medicine, deliberate practice at the bedside remains the most important path to expert performance but must be augmented with virtual patient encounters. NEJM Healer provides simulated patient encounters and the diagnostic schemas and illness scripts learners need to develop their clinical reasoning skills, plus detailed feedback and assessment tools for educators to track learners’ progress.

Raja-Elie Abdulnour, MD, is co-developer and lead editor of NEJM Healer and Director of Educational Innovation at NEJM Group. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and faculty member in Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Explaining the inspiration for NEJM Healer, Dr. Abdulnour notes:

“Even after completing two years of medical school and achieving exceptional grades on numerous exams, I felt clueless when I encountered my very first patient. He presented with a chronic cough.

After 45 minutes of gathering history and performing a physical exam, I was still unable to provide the patient with the differential diagnosis, let alone a care plan. I stepped out of the patient room to discuss the case with my attending who was immediately able to synthesize the case. I was impressed by her expertise yet remained perplexed as to how I could have been such a successful student, yet unable to perform even the simplest of clinical tasks.

At the end of my internal medicine residency, I sat for the USMLE Step 3. The exam included a clinical case simulator. I was immediately fascinated by the simulated experience of gathering data to formulate a differential diagnosis yet hoped for a slicker, richer, and more robust application. I left that exam room fully confident that the future of medical assessment must include clinical simulation.”

Learn more about the origin of NEJM Healer

Experience NEJM Healer

Schedule a NEJM Healer demonstration and see how easy it is to integrate sound clinical reasoning curriculum and assessment into your program.

Meet the Experts Who Bring You NEJM Healer

NEJM Healer is created and supported by some of today’s brightest and most well-respected minds in medicine, medical education, cognitive science and clinical reasoning.

Editors and Publisher
NEJM Healer is a product of NEJM Group — Owned & Published by the MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY

Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D.

NEJM Group Editor

Raja-Elie E. Abdulnour, M.D.

Lead Editor and Director, Educational Innovation,
NEJM Group

James Phimister

Managing Director,
NEJM Group Education and Applied Knowledge

Matthew O'Rourke

General Manager
Clinical Reasoning Advisors

Judith L. Bowen, M.D., Ph.D.

Anthony Miller, MEd, PA-C

Andrew Olson, M.D.

Andrew Parsons, M.D.

Joseph Rencic, M.D.

Verity Schaye, M.D., M.H.P.E.

Nathan Stehouwer, M.D.

Managing Editor

Maniver Deol, M.D.

Associate Editors

David Furfaro, M.D.

Scott Stern, M.D.

Rebecca Sternschein, M.D.

Colin Washington, M.D.

Contributing Editors

Jerome Ecker, M.D.

Brian Ford, M.D.

Benjamin Kalivas, M.D.

Ann Marie Kumfer, M.D.

Travis Smith, D.O.

Rian Kabir, M.D.

View Complete Masthead →

NEJM Healer Editorial Process

NEJM Group applies a rigorous process to the development of the cases, illness script library and schemas found in NEJM Healer.

NEJM Group Education Offers Several Learning, Assessment & Teaching Resources for Medical Education

As clinicians, faculty, medical researchers, and healthcare education specialists we understand the mission and challenges of developing great clinicians.

We help by creating innovative and engaging education offerings that allow trainees to navigate their early career and make meaningful connections between clinical science and clinical practice via knowledge, reasoning, metacognition, skills, and assessment. NEJM Group products also provide powerful curriculum-building and assessment tools for resource-strapped educators.

NEJM Healer is the most comprehensive and engaging way to teach and assess clinical reasoning and to demonstrate to learners how to think like an expert clinician. NEJM Healer offers medical schools, physician assistant programs, residency programs and other clinical training programs a systematic way to develop, evaluate, and remediate students’ diagnostic reasoning skills.

The most effective and engaging way for clinicians to learn, improve their practice, and prepare for board exams. NEJM Knowledge+ engages, guides, and assesses trainees with personalized learning that combines comprehensive, peer-reviewed content and a novel adaptive learning platform that remediates weaknesses and improves metacognition. Faculty can use NEJM Knowledge+ to assess their learners down to the individual learning objective and ensure they are prepared to perform well on their board certification exams.

High-value content, interactive learning resources and new, originally created education materials that provide residents with foundational clinical information. NEJM Resident 360 helps support self-paced, self-directed resident education, with the expertly curated resources they need – all in one place. It presents information in intuitive, engaging, and interactive formats that make it easy for residents to manage their learning time.

Experience NEJM Healer

Schedule a NEJM Healer demonstration and see how easy it is to integrate sound clinical reasoning curriculum and assessment into your program.

Why NEJM Healer is Different than Other Clinical Reasoning Products

NEJM Healer combines clinical knowledge with clinical reasoning. It demystifies clinical reasoning by disaggregating the thinking process of an expert diagnostician into discrete, copyable steps, provides multiple levels of assessment and feedback on individual student’s clinical reasoning skills, and presents data-driven, expert-reviewed cases and supporting content that leads to improved student outcomes on the path to diagnostic excellence.

NEJM Healer offers an innovative approach to teaching and assessing clinical reasoning through a granular view of the diagnostic process. When we embarked on the mission of developing software to teach and assess clinical reasoning, we immediately realized that a mere simulation of a medical apprenticeship was not enough. We needed to teach and assess the explicit steps of clinical reasoning and help learners understand and apply the science behind the art of medicine. Educators and students alike gain deep insights into students’ abilities in multiple component areas of the reasoning process to arrive at a holistic picture of their strengths and weaknesses.

TESTIMONIALS

Top Institutions Around the Globe Trust NEJM Healer

What makes NEJM Healer innovative is its approach to tap into the science of clinical problem solving (reasoning) through the use of illness scripts and by prompting users to consider how data contributes to the final diagnosis in clinical cases. This product can be of tremendous value to students as they prepare for real patient encounters.
Anthony A. Miller, M.Ed., PA-C (Emeritus) Distinguished Professor Division of Physician Assistant Studies
Shenandoah University
As an educator, the most exciting aspect of NEJM Healer for an educator is the objective data! Historically, clinical reasoning is assessed by an educator's gestalt... does the student "get it" or not? NEJM Healer breaks down the clinical reasoning process into well-defined steps that can be easily measured to help determine the strengths or deficits in the clinical reasoning process. This creates an incredible potential for remediating students with clinical reasoning difficulties.
Nicholas Duca, MD Assistant Professor of Medicine Clerkship Director for Internal Medicine
Penn State College of Medicine
NEJM healer is most exciting to me as a learning and assessment tool, providing unprecedented parameters and perspectives on learner growth and development. It fits perfectly within a competency-based medical education assessment for learning system.
Myles Nickolich, MD, Assistant Dean for Education in the Clinical Learning Environment, Penn State College of Medicine
Associate Program Director for the Penn State Cancer Institute Hematology-Oncology Fellowship Program
High scores for program/institution
Career advancement
Relief of administrative burdens
Ease of curriculum development/integration
98% better compared to traditional class teaching
Reduces the time spent on learning by 50%

Experience a Patient Encounter Yourself

Deliberate Practice for Developing Sound Clinical Reasoning and Achieving Diagnostic Excellence