Product Knowledge Training Is Under Pressure. Here’s How Gamified Digital Simulations Can Help

Healthcare products can be deeply complex.

This is a challenge that's particularly felt by sales and support teams: people who are expected to articulate a level of detail about those products that would once have been confined to clinical or specialist settings.

And they’re not alone.

Across plenty of other roles, ranging from onboarding specialists to field-based educators, employees will often find themselves in need of similar degrees of understanding.

Whether they're dealing with a pH-sensitive etchant, a new pharmaceutical product, or a multi-component surgical device, there are learning curves at stake here which can escalate quickly, and even the best L&D formats can start to strain under that kind of pressure. And this strain is felt all the more keenly when today’s learners expect heightened levels of engagement and application from their L&D resources.

Those expectations are well-backed, too. There’s growing evidence that single-mode, passive learning, like reading, watching, or static quiz-taking underperforms when it’s not paired with more active and immersive approaches. A recent systematic review published in BMC Medical Education found that, compared to traditional methods, digital simulation-based learning in healthcare significantly enhanced learners’: 

• Skill development 

• Knowledge retention 

• Self-reported confidence  

While the study focused on clinical students, the findings are equally applicable to commercial product training in healthcare. When the subject matter is technical and requires hands-on familiarity, active and multimodal methods outperform static alternatives. 

And for healthcare product organizations, any risk of lost knowledge matters. Teams who don’t fully retain or internalize product information may struggle to adequately explain key features or (crucially) support clinical users with confidence, creating potential knock-on effects for patient outcomes.  

So, for healthcare product brands, the question is this: how do you accommodate the increasingly complex training needs of sales and support staff in the commercial healthcare sector? Read on to discover: 

• Why even well-designed product knowledge training can struggle under pressure 

• The hidden risks of poor retention in complex healthcare sales environments 

• What the research says about multimodal learning (and why it matters) 

• How immersive learning technology can bridge the gap between knowledge and confidence 

Why Healthcare Product Knowledge Is Unusually Demanding 

Not all product knowledge is created equal for commercial teams, and in healthcare, the learning curve is steep. Whether it’s a diagnostic device, a pharmaceutical therapy, or a connected digital platform, the typical healthcare product today is: 

• Scientifically dense 

• Procedurally complex 

• Highly regulated  

• Potentially higher risk (and higher benefit) 

And in the face of these complexities, the need for clear, accessible product understanding extends beyond the sales conversation to encompass internal support teams, external healthcare professionals, and even patient education initiatives. 

But understanding what a product does is just the first piece of the puzzle. It’s equally essential to understand how, when, and why it’s used in real-world care settings, even (especially, in fact) for those without a clinical background. After all, even a small misunderstanding at the commercial level can contribute to missteps at the point of care. 

Take, for example, a sales representative supporting a new dental biomaterial. Any salesperson needs to understand the composition and packaging of their product. But in this instance, that knowledge might need to be accompanied by granular details such as: 

• How it behaves under different clinical conditions 

• What contraindications exist for specific patient types 

• How it compares to competitors in terms of both clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness 

• Case selection and how to manage any potential complications 

This form of granularity occurs in healthcare products across healthcare sectors. In dental practice, a salesperson may be required to explain why a certain light-curing sequence matters. In diabetes management devices, support staff may need to cover the finer points of how an algorithm adjusts for varied meal timing and exercise. And all of this will need to be articulated clearly, confidently, and within regulatory boundaries (to customers who may, themselves, be specialists). 

This is a level of depth that goes well beyond the basic product familiarity that might be supplied by standard healthcare training software: it demands the fluency and confidence to field unpredictable questions. That's a lot to ask of the kind of static learning and development courses found in a standard LMS, making it all too easy for some of these details to fall by the wayside. And in this industry, knowledge gaps can have expensive consequences. 

What Are the Top 3 Key Product Training Risks in Healthcare? 

In healthcare, training gaps can't be relied on to announce themselves. Their effects are more likely to surface when it's too late (when a conversation veers off-course, for example, or when a claim is unintentionally overstated). These are undramatic manifestations of training gaps, but that doesn't mean the stakes aren't high. And they stand to emerge across three areas (in ascending order of impact): regulation, reputation, and revenue. 

3) Regulation: Why Accurate Product Claims Matter 

In regulated industries like healthcare, how a product is described matters just as much as how it performs. This is a topic of interest to regulators like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which routinely flags promotional violations ranging from off-label claims and unbalanced risk-benefit messaging to overstated impacts. 

According to a 2024 report from the FDA, almost 3,000 reports of potentially misleading or false promotion have been submitted to the Bad Ad Program, which encompasses not only TV and radio advertisements but sales representative presentations too. The FDA points out that unsupported claims and misleading comparisons are among the most common issues in these promotions, highlighting the need for salespeople to have strong recall and, ideally, access to on-the-go refreshers of the information that matters most.  

Importantly, the risk here isn’t limited solely to what's said in pre-prepared pitches and presentations, but how equipped sales and support teams are to answer more spontaneous technical questions while staying well within the parameters of the relevant regulation. When teams' learning and development platforms are limited to static training materials, that kind of confident, compliant communication becomes much harder to guarantee: as the BMC Medical Education article mentioned above points out, knowledge retention is more effective when delivered through immersive modes of learning.

And as the director of the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion has noted, noncompliance can result in criminal investigation or enforcement, which has huge practical and reputational implications. In extreme cases, it may even introduce avoidable patient risk, underscoring the importance of clarity in every product conversation. 

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2) Reputation: What Happens When Product Knowledge Fails 

Credibility matters in any sector, but the need for trust is especially acute in the healthcare industry. Clinicians and procurement leads certainly expect confidence, but they equally expect salespeople to come equipped with the precision and technical accuracy to back it up.  

Buyers make decisions based on how confident they feel in both the product and the person representing it. If customer-facing staff miscommunicate a technical detail or overstep a claim, that mismatch can lead to regret after a purchase decision has been made, especially in complex, high-stakes environments like healthcare. As Gartner reports, higher levels of purchase regret significantly reduce buyer loyalty and advocacy.  

In practice, that means even small cracks in trust can have outsized commercial effects over time. 

1) Revenue: How Product Knowledge Drives Commercial Success 

Whether through noncompliance penalties or reductions in advocacy, sub-par product knowledge can have a real impact on an organization’s bottom line.  

But, of course, the reverse is equally true. The same Gartner report points to the value of an ‘information connector’: a salesperson whose rich bank of product information leaves them equipped to direct customers toward the answers they need. That value isn’t abstract, either. Information connectors increase the likelihood of achieving a large, complex, and low-regret sale by 90%. 

And this insight brings us back to the power of immersive, multimodal, and digital simulation-based training. Keeping an organization out of regulatory or reputational trouble is a great start, but the real benefits emerge when they fuel value-led, information-rich customer interactions with ease at their core. 

What Does Better Product Training Look Like? 

Given the risks (and the stakes) involved in this space, the product knowledge training behind it needs to be commensurately impactful. In practice, that means teams tasked with mastering complex, high-stakes products, from sales and onboarding staff to patient education programs, need training that’s interactive and engaging. 

This is where multimodal learning comes into play. By conveying key information across a variety of formats and through a mix of learning activities, organizations can help staff absorb information more deeply and apply it with greater confidence. That might mean simulation-based training tools with features that support: 

• Augmented reality training simulations  

• Interactive 3D models  

• Tailored, AI-powered assessment feedback  

• Gamified activities 

These formats build the kind of readiness that translates into the all-important credibility (and regulatory compliance) that healthcare product brands rely on. 

As highlighted in a literature review published in Advances in Simulation, simulation-based learning is especially valuable when preparing learners for infrequent, technical, or high-stakes situations. These are the conditions that define plenty of healthcare product conversations and buttress the understanding that protects everything from brand reputation to patient welfare. 

Frequently Asked Questions

In a Rush? Here's the TL;DR 

Effective healthcare product training needs to go beyond the basics. When the stakes include compliance, commercial success, and patient safety, it takes a multimodal approach to deliver the confidence customer-facing teams need. 

Product Knowledge Training: 4 Key Takeaways 

1. Healthcare product knowledge is uniquely demanding. Sales and support teams need to understand technically dense and highly regulated products (often at a level that goes beyond traditional commercial training).
2. Traditional learning formats are under pressure. Content with minimal opportunities for interactivity, like slide decks, PDFs, and even LMS-hosted click-throughs, can struggle to equip teams with the confidence and fluency needed for those high-stakes product conversations. 
3. Knowledge gaps carry real risk. Poor product understanding can have consequences along regulatory, trust-based, and commercial lines, all of which impact revenue. More importantly, when these gaps in understanding reach the point of care, they introduce unnecessary risk to patient safety. 
4. Multimodal, immersive training improves learning and development outcomes. Interactive formats (such as simulations, manipulable 3D models, and scenario-based learning) support more confident, compliant communication. 

Ready to Find Out How Digital Simulation Can Supercharge Your Product Training? 

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Editor's note: this article was updated in October 2025 to add further insight.

This article was reviewed for clinical accuracy and educational relevance by Hilary Gupte (BSc, PGCE), a registered nurse and experienced clinical educator, and Dr. Martin Ling, a GDC-registered dentist and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.