From technology adoption to curricular coherence: technology-enhanced simulation as a bridge in health professions education

Technology-enhanced simulation is expanding rapidly across health professions education, yet technological capability does not by itself establish educational value. This narrative review with structured literature identification and conceptual synthesis examines how simulation-based experiences and associated digital, immersive, artificial intelligence-enabled, asynchronous, and analytic resources can be positioned within curricula to connect foundational knowledge, context-sensitive clinical reasoning, situated and collaborative performance, feedback, competency evidence, and learner progression. The review integrates established simulation scholarship with literature on curriculum development, clinical reasoning, procedural and interprofessional learning, competency-based education, programmatic assessment, educational technology, equity, faculty development, governance, and implementation. The synthesis proposes the Curricular Bridge Model for Technology-Enhanced Simulation as an author-derived, meso-level conceptual model and design heuristic. Its contribution is relational rather than component-based: curricular purpose precedes technology selection; simulation experiences are connected longitudinally through feedback, meaningful variation, and renewed practice; simulation-generated evidence remains bounded and complementary to workplace evidence; and equity, faculty capability, governance, infrastructure, scalability, and sustainability condition the entire system. Seven conceptual propositions are articulated to make the model examinable and to guide a staged validation agenda. The model is not presented as an empirically validated framework. Rather, it offers a transparent hypothesis about how simulation may operate as connective curricular infrastructure and identifies specific relationships that require external conceptual scrutiny, application testing, and empirical evaluation.