Most medical students don’t have an access problem in theory, they have one in practice. In the clinical years, a student might see one or two real patients a week, and get a minute or two of actual contact with each. There’s no time to take a full history, no room to order your own investigations, and no chance to sit with a decision and see it play out. Question banks fill the gap, but they test recall of a case someone else already worked up. They don’t replicate the pressure of a patient sitting in front of you who’s vague and slightly off-script, and they certainly don’t hand you the power to order the labs, read the imaging, and commit to a plan yourself.
That’s the gap Diagnosica is trying to close. It’s a clinical simulator that runs a whole case, not a question about a case someone else already worked up. You take the history from a video patient by voice or text, order your own labs and imaging, and see the actual results yourself: real images to read, real values to interpret, not a report that tells you what they mean. Most tools offer investigations in name only, because rendering an actual scan or panel for a student to work through is hard to build. Diagnosica does it anyway. You then commit to a diagnosis and management plan, and get marked on it. No faculty slot required. No booking a sim centre room. Just you, a case, and about ten minutes.
The product comes from a two-person team: an engineer named Mostafa and his co-founder Youssef, a clinician who writes and signs off every case in the library. That combination matters. The product feels technically clean, but the cases feel medically considered. The library already spans dozens of cases across a dozen-plus specialties, and it’s growing by the day.
Key Features of Diagnosica
Talking to an AI Patient
The encounter opens with a video patient in a tile on your screen. You ask questions by voice or by typing, in your own words, with no scripted prompts guiding you toward the right answer. The patient answers in character and only reveals what you actually ask about. Vitals sit in the side panel, scratch notes stay visible, and there’s no rubric ticking away during the conversation. The point is that you stay in the encounter rather than performing for a checklist.
Ordering Investigations Without Hints
After the history, you search a catalogue of hundreds of real lab tests and imaging studies and order whatever you think you need. There’s no restriction, either: if you want to order a test that turns out completely normal, or an image that shows nothing relevant, you can, exactly like a real doctor working through uncertainty rather than being handed a pre-filtered shortlist. Nothing in the catalogue flags the right answer.
Reading a 12-lead ECG trace or a CT head and writing your own interpretation before moving on is where a lot of the learning actually happens. Every test costs money, and Diagnosica tracks what you spend, so ordering everything “just in case” has a real cost that gets scored, along with how well you actually used what came back. The system records your first entry, so committing matters.
Diagnosis, Differentials, and a Management Plan
Before anyone tells you the answer, you write your working diagnosis, your differentials, and a management plan. This is the step that separates running a case from watching one. Diagnosica’s co-founder described the core problem as the gap between knowing medicine and doing medicine, and this step is where that gap is most visible. Writing a plan with nothing narrowed down for you is a very different exercise from selecting from five options.
A Scored Debrief Across Four Competencies
The scorecard gives you a mark out of 100 with each competency graded separately and a written note on what you missed. The scoring is explicitly labelled as formative feedback, not assessment, and the team is upfront that it hasn’t yet been validated against a panel of clinicians. That’s honest, and it’s the right framing. Treat the number as a prompt to think rather than a verdict. A full transcript with slips marked is included, along with suggested next cases if you want to drill the same area.
Priya’s 11pm Case Before Her First Ward Shift
Priya is a final-year medical student in Manchester. The night before her first internal medicine ward placement, at around 11pm, she opened Diagnosica on her laptop and started a cardiology case. The patient was a 58-year-old male presenting with crushing chest pain. She took the history by typing, asking about onset, radiation, associated symptoms, and past medical history. The patient mentioned sweating and breathlessness but didn’t volunteer his diabetes or his family history of MI until she asked directly.
She ordered a 12-lead ECG and high-sensitivity troponin, read the ECG herself and noted ST elevation in the inferior leads, then committed to an STEMI diagnosis before seeing the rubric. Her management plan included aspirin and cardiology referral but missed explicit PCI pathway activation.
The scorecard came back at 61 out of 100. The clinical workup section was solid. The approach to treatment section flagged the PCI pathway gap as a safety concern. The written debrief explained exactly why that mattered. Priya said later that the exercise surfaced a specific gap she hadn’t known was there, and that it was far more useful than reading the same ACS guidelines again the night before a shift.
How a Case Runs in Diagnosica
Step 1: The Encounter
You open a case from the library and meet your patient on screen. Speak or type your questions. The patient answers, pauses, and occasionally goes quiet. Vitals are visible in the side panel. This step has no rubric ticking in the background.
Step 2: Examine and Investigate
Search a catalogue of hundreds of real lab tests and imaging studies and order whatever you think you need. Nothing is flagged as relevant or irrelevant beforehand, order a test that comes back completely normal, or an image that shows nothing, and you’re free to, exactly like a real doctor working through uncertainty rather than being handed a shortlist. You interpret the imaging yourself and write your read before moving forward. Every test costs money, and Diagnosica tracks what you spend, so ordering everything “just in case” has a real cost that gets scored, along with how well you actually used what came back.
Step 3: Diagnose and Prescribe
Write your main diagnosis, your differentials, and a management plan. Nothing is narrowed down for you at this stage, you’re choosing from hundreds of possible management options, from something as small as giving aspirin to major surgery and the trickiest treatment calls in between. You’re the doctor now, and you’ll be judged on the plan you commit to. Your first entry stands.
Step 4: Scorecard and Debrief
The rubric reveals what you hit and what you missed across four safety-weighted competencies. A written debrief and a full annotated transcript follow, plus suggested cases for further practice. A global leaderboard shows how you rank against other trainees at the same stage, broken out by specialty.
Pricing
The first case is free with no account required. For Product Hunt visitors, there’s a 50% discount on the first three months using the code PRODUCTHUNT at checkout. Specific plan pricing isn’t listed publicly on the site, so the best way to see what applies to you is to start a free case and check from there.
Worth Trying If You’re a Medical Student or Junior Doctor
Diagnosica won’t replace supervised clinical training, and the team says so clearly inside the product. What it gives you instead is a full library of cases, built to genuinely span the range: the everyday presentations you’ll see on every shift, right through to the complex, tricky cases most doctors only encounter a handful of times in a career. Running through them closes the gap between what you learn in theory and what’s actually waiting for you in clinic or the emergency room, and it takes some of the fear out of walking in for the first time not knowing what to expect.
The advantage compounds fast. Most medical students go through their entire degree having worked up one or two full cases start to finish. On Diagnosica, you can rack up a hundred by next month. And because every case comes with real imaging and lab results you have to read yourself rather than a pre-written answer, by the time a doctor hands you an actual X-ray or CT on the ward, you’ve already had the practice to read it with confidence.
Start a free case at diagnosica.com, no signup needed.
