Virtual Reality has been a trend for events for around a decade now, and it has an opportunity to break out in the medical industry. Healthcare leaders think that VR could be used for surgical trending. Justin Vara of Osso VR spoke at SXSW, and his organization won the Innovation Award for VR, AR, and MR. He made a fascinating and thorough case that VR can help with surgical training. They secured additional funding last week so, this startup will only grow.
To maintain current trends, surgeons should discover and rehearse the latest innovations. Healthcare embraces technology for medical advancement. VR is not just for entertainment but for helping people. What is the best way to solve this problem? These are some of the paraphrased points Vara touched upon during his talk at the conference:
How Are Healthcare Workers Trained
How does the healthcare industry train medical professionals in learning surgical techniques? The current training model is basically “watch it once and do it again.” The origins of surgical training were fascinating. It was done with one-on-one apprenticeships, which would follow an expert for at least a year or even a few years to learn what to do. There was a hierarchy from simple to complex procedures that surgeons could work on. Various levels of surgery had more responsibility and would manage below them.
What Are the Issues with Training?
There is too much to know, and every potential scenario is considered. Recent surgery is overly complex with robots and minimally invasive surgery; navigation and a patient-first determination can be more challenging to learn. Typically, a surgical student will have to operate on between a dozen to two dozen patients to hit the threshold to be competent to complete a successful surgery. Robotics can have a learning curve of up to 100 cases!
How does healthcare measure technical training? Not as well as other professions. Pilots get retrained every six months and learn how to land a plane if an engine goes out. Another issue is that different people do different tasks, and it is hard to keep up. UCLA discovered that, on average, one surgeon worked with 25 Surg Techs and 51 anesthesiologists in a month. Also, 30% of medical graduates could not perform without supervision, so there is a learning curve even when on-the-job training is not the best.
What Does the Data Show Using VR?
With VR (Virtual Reality) for surgical training, you can train in-person and remotely. Multiple studies from various institutions show.
UCLA study 10 trained in person and ten on virtual Reality. Healthcare is about people making judgment calls. Their evaluation system, called OSATs, found VR-trained students scored 10 points better than in person.
University of Illinois - Chicago published in Core. Monitored students to see who needed training. Traditional training was 25% completed, but students who trained with VR had a 78% success rate!
Wake Forest students found that 100% of the residents recommended VR training. They also did a motion tracker study on surgeons performing surgery and then training in VR. The conclusion in the data was almost the same in both models.
How Do You Use It?
This form of collective training unites people at various locations. Surgery can be amusing for the right personalities, and the training should be too to improve concentration and create memorable positive experiences. They are making the technology about accessibility and the needed soft skills training. What kind of troubleshooting should be done? Students can recall what steps must be taken, especially when efficiency and time are required.
Various generations adapt to VR technology, but there is a distinction between 30 seconds of picking up and adapting to the tech. Construct validity was mentioned and should put naysayers at ease. People learn how to perform surgery on the program if they know how to perform surgery.
A critical point mentioned was that VR is designed to make surgery work better and not to be a supplement for in-person instruction. With medical advancements in medicine, healthcare institutions should consider the future and the work organizations like Osso VR are doing.
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