Can AI Patients Build Nursing Gut Instinct?

What if new nurses could build gut instinct in months instead of years? Ryan Schmaltz, CEO and co-founder of PatientReady, joins Nurse Rosa to explore how AI-powered simulation is transforming clinical education and tackling the global nursing workforce shortage.

Ryan spent two decades in emerging tech, from Uber's global expansion to immersive VR and AR, before turning his focus to healthcare's most urgent problem: preparing clinicians for high-stakes decisions at scale. In this conversation, he and Rosa dig into AI patient simulations, the pandemic-era experience gap, nurse skepticism about AI, the faculty shortage, and the one thing technology can never replace: the human connection at the bedside.

Rosa even shares her own experience talking with "Lauren," PatientReady's AI patient, and asks Ryan her signature question: how would you invest $1 billion in healthcare? His answer might surprise you.

In this episode:

Why nurse gut instinct takes 5 years to feel and 10 to 12 years to trust

How pandemic-era graduates missed critical clinical reps, and what that means now

The AI debrief feature dividing nursing professors

How faculty are using AI to cut scenario writing from weeks to days

Why augmentation, not replacement, is the future of simulation labs

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction: Meet Ryan Schmaltz and PatientReady

1:11 – What is the global nursing workforce crisis?