Virtual Reality in Higher and Health Professions Education and Its Transferability to Competency-Based Virtual Placements in Health Informatics: A Systematic Review

This systematic review examined virtual reality (VR) interventions in higher and health professions education and their alignment with the AMIA foundational domains underpinning CAHIIM accreditation to inform competency-based health informatics (HI) virtual placements. Following PRISMA 2020 (PROSPERO CRD420251009479), four databases were searched for English-language empirical studies published from 1 January 2011 to 1 October 2026; studies were appraised with JBI checklists and synthesized narratively following SWiM. A total of 323 studies were included, most quasi-experimental (48.0%), fully immersive (39.9%), guided (70.9%), and assessed only immediately after the intervention (75.9%). In the primary analysis (directly assessed and transferable mappings), coverage concentrated in decision-making (33.4%) and workflow analysis (24.1%), with computational reasoning (21.4%), communication/teamwork (20.1%), data interpretation (13.9%), systems thinking (1.9%), and privacy/security (0.6%) less common, and excluding spatial, motor, and procedural analogs left little of the computational-reasoning coverage. Only one study enrolled HI learners, none simulated an operational informatics setting, and five reports could not be retrieved, so the coverage estimates are conditional on the retrieved corpus. Transferable VR evidence therefore concentrates in cognitive competencies and is near-absent for governance competencies; the findings identify candidate instructional relevance rather than demonstrated effectiveness, and the proposed design requirements for HI virtual placements are a hypothesis-generating model derived from, not demonstrated by, the review.