Thursday, 9 April, 2020 UTC
Summary
Source
Healthcare has been slow to evolve. But that’s all set to change.
As most industries evolve beyond recognition, healthcare has long been relatively immune to change. Perhaps there’s something alarming about ‘disrupting’ an industry that deals with people’s lives. Change is always associated with risk, so sticking to convention might serve to minimise the harm of unintended consequences.
But if providing a more efficient, higher quality healthcare service is the overall objective, what if sticking to convention is actually the more risky option?
Clearly, there are many reasons healthcare has been slow to evolve. While the context varies from country to country, some factors seem to hold true globally. Legislation tends to be more stringent than in other industries, regulators are more keen to maintain the status quo and patients prefer to stick to familiar treatments and processes.
But there are encouraging signs of change.
In recent years, rapid technological advancement has forced the early signs of change.
This includes, but is not exclusive to:
- Big data (and the ability to store it in the cloud). This has led to new companies optimising healthcare delivery across entire regions. Algorithms allocate doctors to hospitals based on real-time information and predict medical shortages long before they occur (see BroadReach Healthcare).
- Platform technology, which has put healthcare in people’s pockets and connected doctors to patients in ways that circumvent the bureaucracy of public institutions and alleviate pressure in the healthcare system (see Babylon Health).
- 3D printing has decreased the cost of manufacturing healthcare equipment and allowed for personalisation based on patients’ unique physiological needs. Personalisation extends into prosthetics, artificial skin, dental implants and hearing aids (see Materialise).
- AI robots. In the operating room, robots can aid a human surgeon or carry out operations by themselves. In the home, they can support people’s rehabilitation efforts and help older people to remain independent for longer (see Intuitive Surgical).
There’s strong evidence for the use of immersive technology in healthcare.
Immersive technology refers to technology that simulates a real world experience through digital content and multi-sensory simulation. The most immersive form of this technology is virtual reality (VR). VR is quickly joining the list above.
Despite the healthcare barriers previously outlined, VR has started to penetrate the healthcare industry, with scientifically proven benefits.
The completely immersive nature of VR means that it’s particularly well suited for educational, training and therapeutic purposes.
In terms of education and training, experiences can be crafted to imprint information on people’s minds more effectively than any other medium. Research suggests that people retain 75% of the information from an experience they physically engage with, which is far superior to having a discussion (50%), receiving a demonstration (30%), watching a video (20%) or reading (10%).
This level of information retention explains how VR has been found to improve training by 230% compared to traditional methods. Surgeons who train in VR have also been shown to complete surgeries 29% faster than those who do not receive simulation training, and are five times less likely to inflict injury.
Aware of the benefits, doctors are now calling for the integration of VR into their training, with 80% of 107 interviewed orthopaedic surgeons saying they’d like to use VR frequently for training, and 90% saying they’d recommend VR training to their peers.
In terms of therapy, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry finds that VR therapy is almost twice as effective as traditional methods for tackling social disorders including anxiety and paranoia.
Clinical psychologists are able to tailor not just the quantity of people (avatars) in the VR experience, but also their friendliness levels, incrementally increasing the severity of exposure. In the research published, VR therapy led to an average drop of 33 points on an anxiety scale of 0 to 144, whilst those receiving traditional therapy dropped about 19 points.
When it comes to pain, an experiment involving 30 patients showed VR experiences to completely relieve the chronic pain of one in three patients, and at least noticeably decrease the pain of all the patients involved.
It doesn’t take much of a leap to envisage how lifestyle-influenced diseases such a obesity and diabetes could also be combated through VR. An interactive experience could reveal the huge implications of significant weight gain for tasks like getting dressed, tying up shoelaces and climbing stairs.
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Making better outcomes a reality with VR.
With a clear benefit of VR usage for training, educational and therapeutic purposes, you might be wondering what the industry is waiting for.
Before more widespread adoption, healthcare providers need to be reassured that:
- VR is a legitimate tool that can be used for technical, commercial purposes beyond gaming.
- The value of the specific VR experience is scientifically proven.
- The experience can be scaled for cost efficiency (a version of it can be used by many healthcare professionals in many contexts).
The first reassurance simply requires education; bringing people up to speed on how VR is already being used. The technology is proving highly useful across different industries, not just in healthcare but also in automotive, fashion and retail.
The second reassurance is carried out as standard procedure. Best in class immersive technology studio Cassette works closely alongside healthcare professionals to uphold scientific validity, and tests experiences throughout production to ensure the user journey is as intended.
The third reassurance is satisfied by the inherently formulaic nature of healthcare. Whether you’re training a doctor in a new procedure or you’re a doctor treating a patient with a diagnosed condition, a specially tailored VR experience can be used as many times as the teaching university or patients require.
Cassette also ensures scalability by working in a platform called Unreal Engine. This allows for the creation of generic templates, into which bespoke features and specific information can be added at a later date. This adaptability massively reduces the cost of VR production, given that healthcare delivery sits on a foundation of templates; protocols, decision trees and medical rooms.
Conclusion.
In recent years, the positive impact of new technologies on the healthcare industry has set an encouraging precedent. Big data, platform technology, 3D printing and AI robots have transformed their respective territories and proved the human benefit of incorporating the latest technology into healthcare provision.
All things considered, it’s clear that immersive technology should go the same way.
Ultimately, in an industry based on saving lives, the most risky option is the status quo; the one where we continue to educate, train and treat people as if we’re living in the 20th century.
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefThe Future of Healthcare: Imagining Better Outcomes With Immersive Technology was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.