Imagine you’re a new doctor starting residency. You’ve graduated out of the medical school setting, where you’d learned and practiced skills with mannequins, cadavers or animal tissues, and this next leap forward in training involves turning the scalpel to a live patient. It’s easy to see why TV medical dramas tend to include at least one physician-in-training fainting or throwing up at this pivotal moment. Even under supervision, that jump to performing procedures on the mother, brother or baby on the operating room table entrusting their life to you, carries an enormous responsibility.

This tried-and-true educational pathway has remained largely the same for decades, and while this system has worked effectively and is necessary, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated challenges that continue to impact the healthcare industry—demonstrating that not only is there room, but, in fact, a growing need to continue advancing the way we train healthcare professionals (HCPs). In 2022 it was estimated that 11% of medical schools used some form of virtual reality to help train in gross anatomy¹.

Supplemental tools leveraging technologies such as virtual reality (VR) can complement traditional education methods and offer a softer, smoother transition to unsupervised patient care while lifting some of the burden from veteran HCPs—which could prove invaluable in systems facing limited access to educational resources or high rates of healthcare worker burnout and staffing shortages.

How can VR training benefit students, professionals and patients today?

VR can benefit professionals across levels of expertise, helping commit knowledge to memory and muscle memory without the pressure of a real care event². Donning a VR headset, a nurse can, for example, insert an IV from start to finish according to guidelines an unlimited number of times—without hurting or disturbing a real patient and with data to help them understand where they’ve encountered issues—until they run through the procedure confidently and correctly every time.

In this immersive digital environment that simulates the real care environment, HCPs learn, reinforce or even correct practices in ways that they can’t with traditional learning aids like mannequins. Learning can happen at an individual’s pace and convenience. Even veteran practitioners and trainers can retrain to current clinical standards and usage recommendations from device manufacturers. One review of the literature concluded that people trained by virtual reality had fewer performance errors and higher accuracy compared to those trained by conventional approaches.³

Amid staffing challenges we face in today’s healthcare environment, VR can lift the burden of process-oriented lessons and offer a platform for at-will training that better fits into tight clinician schedules. These advantages may provide trainers more time with patients or allows in-person education sessions to take on new dimensions.

By helping to build skill and confidence in practitioners, VR can also help alleviate the fear, doubt, discomfort and embarrassment that patients may experience during a visit with an unskilled practitioner, potentially improving the likelihood of a better patient experience and outcome.  

What role can VR play in the future of care education and innovation?

As an industry, we are just scratching the surface of how VR can facilitate expert or peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, our understanding of disease, new therapies, patient education and engagement, and other important areas of care. Importantly, this technology is also opening up new possibilities for HCPs to become greater innovation partners, allowing them to experience products in earlier stages of development and provide invaluable feedback to inform an end solution that works better for them and for their patients. These concepts could manifest in clinically helpful ways, such as collaborations that inform the way we design and educate around one-off solutions, or how MedTech companies can help meet the needs of entire care organizations in building and refining an optimal mix of solutions and workflows predicated on their unique patient case mix. VR even holds the potential to unlock new avenues for patient education and proper compliance to treatment plans.

At BD, we’re focused on leveraging VR in various forms to meet needs across areas of care—including delivering training to support healthcare provider education that ranges from placing catheters that support fluid and vascular access management to guiding workflows for medication management solutions. We’re excited to continue leveraging extended reality capabilities to deliver the future of MedTech today.