Virtual Reality Hotspotting for Training Healthcare Professionals

Application

A software application to educate and train healthcare professionals on addressing complex health-related needs of patients with frequent hospital visits after hospital discharge through virtual healthcare hotspotting.

Key Benefits

• Remote learning without requiring colocation but achieving the same impact. Particularly useful in conditions like when a pandemic arises.
• Ability to involve larger groups of personnel to perform group exercises interactively in simulated environments beyond hospital walls.
• Interdisciplinary coordination and collaboration to achieve a comprehensive understanding of complex healthcare scenarios, including community and care transitions, effective intervention, and improved outpatient care outcomes.
• Optimized use of limited healthcare resources to optimally serve high-needs and high-cost patients.
• This approach specifically useful for super-utilizers - patients with profiles such as multiple hospitalizations, re-hospitalizations, and emergency care visits in a short period.

Market Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a direct impact on the growth of VR-based teaching technologies and services in education, with all educational institutions, from K-12 to vocational, either using or exploring VR for teaching and training purposes. The market for VR-based technologies has grown significantly due to advancements in infrastructures such as cloud-based services and lower-cost hardware, alongside increased development of applications and tools that work seamlessly with new wireless communication technologies such as 5G. It is predicted that healthcare will be among the top industries to continue adopting VR technology, highlighting the need for an effective and dynamic training mechanism for healthcare professionals to provide holistic care to patients with complex needs using new technologies such as VR and AR.

Technical Summary

A team of Emory University researchers has developed a novel method of using VR technology called to achieve coordinated care for patients with complex needs. A combination of VR’s increasing maturity and capabilities with the large amounts of de-identified patient data from across the care continuum is utilized in this novel application. The application enables large groups of learning/teaching personnel to interact virtually in simulated patient encounter cases prior to handling real patients. Healthcare professionals can garner the necessary multi-disciplinary, coordinated care capabilities and experience to treat the whole patient, including non-medical needs as necessary, using this approach. In this manner, the necessary experience and insights that will make future real patient encounters by these professionals to be more effective and optimized is made possible by leveraging VR-Big Data. Simultaneously, the approach demonstrates new ways of strategically reallocating limited healthcare resources to optimally serve high-needs and high-cost patients while minimizing straining the healthcare system.