Building a virtual community for nursing education: the town of Mirror Lake.

RNs take pride in delivering high-quality individualized care to their patients. However, how do nursing students learn the principles of professional nursing or develop the competencies necessary to individualize patient care? At the Ohio State University College of Nursing, we embarked on deploying a virtual community of patients to enhance our students' learning experience. Our community, the town of Mirror Lake, contains 165 people and 62 households, with an apartment complex, a medical center, and a retirement center with assisted and skilled nursing care. This community serves as the main source of patients for Mirror Lake Medical Center, our virtual hospital. We think we can teach many key principles of sound nursing care using this virtual community of patients. This article presents the rationale behind the decision to take on this endeavor, as well as the processes used for development of our community.