To make a video for a medical school case presentation, keep the order your faculty expects (patient identification and presenting complaint, history, examination, investigations, assessment with differentials, plan) and use the video for what a slide deck does badly: drawing the mechanism behind the diagnosis and the reasoning that ruled other diagnoses in or out. Fully de-identify any real patient before you write a word, and never paste real clinical notes into an online tool. Aim for six to ten minutes, about 900 to 1,500 words of narration at 150 words a minute, and spend at least a third of it on the assessment, because that is where examiners look for clinical reasoning.

Privacy comes first

If your case is based on a real patient, the rules apply before you open any software.

De-identify fully. In the US, the HIPAA Safe Harbor method lists 18 identifiers that must be removed, including names, all geographic units smaller than a state, all elements of dates except the year (admission and discharge dates included), ages over 89, record numbers, and full-face photographs. In the UK and EU, GDPR and the GMC's confidentiality guidance set a similar expectation: if a patient could reasonably be recognised from what you present, they are identifiable. A rare condition plus a ward plus a month can be enough.

Do not upload real notes, images or scans to any cloud tool, including video tools and chatbots, unless your institution has approved that tool for patient data. Write a fresh, de-identified summary yourself and work only from that.

Imaging and photographs need consent and usually your trust's or hospital's approval. When in doubt, use a drawn illustration or a teaching image your school has licensed.

Follow your school's policy. Many medical schools have a specific form for using patient material in teaching. Your supervisor will know.

The simplest route for a teaching video is an invented composite patient, labelled as such on the first scene. That is what the example below uses.

The structure examiners expect

A case presentation is a spoken format with a fixed order, and listeners rely on that order to follow along. The video should keep it.

The assessment is where a drawn explainer earns its place. A slide that says "PE secondary to DVT" states a conclusion. A scene where a clot forms in the calf, breaks free, travels through the right heart and lodges in a pulmonary artery shows that you understand it.

Worked example: thrombosis and embolism in a post-operative patient

All details below are invented for teaching.

Identification. Mr A, a 68-year-old retired teacher, presents on day 6 after an elective right total knee replacement with two days of right calf swelling and a three-hour history of sudden, sharp, left-sided chest pain that is worse on inspiration, with breathlessness.

History. Discharged on day 3 with thromboprophylaxis, which he stopped after two doses because he disliked the injections. Mostly in a chair since discharge. No haemoptysis. No previous DVT or PE. Past history of hypertension, on amlodipine. Ex-smoker, 20 pack-years.

Examination. Heart rate 112, respiratory rate 24, blood pressure 128/78, oxygen saturation 91 percent on room air, temperature 37.6 degrees C. Right calf 4 cm larger in circumference than the left, tender along the deep veins. Chest clear on auscultation. No signs of right heart failure.

Investigations. ECG shows sinus tachycardia, the most common ECG finding in PE (the textbook S1Q3T3 pattern is present in only a minority of patients). Arterial blood gas on air shows hypoxaemia with a low PaCO2. Wells score for PE: clinical signs of DVT 3, PE the most likely diagnosis 3, heart rate over 100 1.5, surgery in the past four weeks 1.5, total 9, so PE is likely. Because the score is above 4, he goes straight to CT pulmonary angiography rather than waiting on a D-dimer, which would be raised after surgery anyway. CTPA shows a filling defect in the left lower lobe segmental arteries. Compression ultrasound confirms a right popliteal vein thrombosis. Troponin and an echocardiogram are used to look for right ventricular strain.

Assessment. The teaching point of this case is the difference between two words students often blur.

Thrombosis is the formation of a clot inside a blood vessel in a living person. Virchow's triad explains why it happened here: stasis (immobility after surgery), endothelial injury (the operation on the leg), and hypercoagulability (the post-operative inflammatory state). All three are present, and he stopped his prophylaxis.

Embolism is a mass carried in the bloodstream that lodges somewhere downstream and blocks a vessel. Most emboli are fragments of thrombus, but not all: fat after long-bone fractures, air, and amniotic fluid are the others worth naming.

So Mr A has a thrombosis in the leg and a thromboembolism in the lung. A clot from a deep leg vein travels through the vena cava and the right side of the heart into the pulmonary arteries. It does not normally reach the systemic arteries, unless there is a right-to-left shunt such as a patent foramen ovale, which is how a paradoxical embolism causes a stroke.

Differentials worth one scene each. Pneumonia (no fever pattern or consolidation, though PE can cause a low-grade temperature), acute coronary syndrome (pleuritic pain, no ischaemic ECG changes, and a clot on CTPA; note that troponin can rise in PE too, so it does not separate them on its own), pneumothorax (excluded by imaging), and post-operative atelectasis.

Plan. Anticoagulation, typically a direct oral anticoagulant such as apixaban or rivaroxaban, or low molecular weight heparin, for at least three months for a provoked event. Thrombolysis is reserved for high-risk PE with haemodynamic instability, which he does not have. Learning points: prophylaxis adherence after joint replacement, the Wells score directing the test, and the precise meanings of thrombosis and embolism.

Check doses, durations and local pathways against your own hospital's guideline and a current reference before presenting. Guidance changes, and examiners will ask why you chose what you chose.

Scenes that make the mechanism visible

For the assessment section, a drawn scene list might be:

1. Virchow's triad as three labelled corners, with Mr A's three risk factors placed on each.
2. A deep calf vein, with a clot forming against the valve pocket where flow is slowest.
3. A fragment breaking off and travelling up the femoral and iliac veins to the inferior vena cava.
4. The fragment passing through the right atrium and ventricle into the pulmonary trunk.
5. The clot lodged in a segmental artery, the lung beyond it ventilated but not perfused, labelled V/Q mismatch, leading to hypoxaemia.
6. A side panel showing a patent foramen ovale and the route to the brain, labelled paradoxical embolism, to sharpen the definition.

If you already study this way, how to study for a medical licensing exam visually covers drawing these chains for revision. For process scenes in general, see how to explain a process in a video.

Make it

1. 1

   De-identify or invent the patient

   Remove every identifier, or build a composite case and say so on the first scene. Never paste real notes into an online tool.

2. 2

   Write the presentation in the standard order

   Identification, history, examination, investigations, assessment, plan. Write it as you would say it on a ward round, in full sentences.

3. 3

   Expand the assessment

   Add the mechanism step by step and one short paragraph per differential saying why it is more or less likely.

4. 4

   Draft the video

   Paste your de-identified script into openCanviz with Keep my wording on, so the clinical terms stay exactly as written. Whiteboard style suits anatomy and flow diagrams.

5. 5

   Check every clinical detail on screen

   Vital signs, units, reference ranges, drug names, arrow directions in the circulation. Drafted labels can be wrong, and a vein labelled as an artery will be noticed. Fix any scene in the editor.

6. 6

   Rehearse the questions

   Watch it once and list the three questions an examiner is most likely to ask. Prepare a one-sentence answer for each.

Common questions

Can I use a generated voice? For a recorded teaching video, often yes. For an assessed presentation, check, because many schools mark your spoken delivery. You can replace the generated voice with your own recording and use the drafted scenes as your visual aid.

How much history should I include? Only what changes the reasoning. Relevant negatives (no haemoptysis, no previous VTE) count. A full systems review read aloud does not.

Can I show real imaging? Only with consent and your institution's approval, and with all identifying data removed from the image, including burned-in text. A drawn schematic of the finding is usually enough to make the teaching point.

Should the video include the final diagnosis at the start? Follow your faculty's convention. Grand rounds style often reveals it at the end to test reasoning. Bedside presentations usually state the working diagnosis in the opening line.

How do I cite guidelines? Name the guideline and year on the plan scene, for example your national VTE guideline, and list full references on a final scene.