Looking to 2017, several technology themes are emerging in healthcare education: the long-awaited emergence of virtual reality (VR) and the evolution of “smart” and augmented reality (AR). We’re particularly excited about how these technologies will improve healthcare education. From devices to software, we’re on the precipice of something real.
Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, and the Vive are early-stage devices released to an incredible reception, laying a foundation for an explosion in the VR consumer marketplace. With billions of lines of code expected to be written for VR in 2017, the new dawn is here.
We’ll soon see the reality of incorporating VR into the world of augmenting knowledge and improving healthcare. Here are some ways these technologies will improve healthcare education:
- Teaching medical students. When Case Western opens its new health education campus in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, students won’t learn anatomy from cadavers, they’ll learn from VR. Mark Griswold, PhD, professor in the Department of Radiology, said, “We’ve had many hundreds of years of teaching anatomy the same way, but we also thought the time was right to think about doing it in a new way…it’s very difficult to maintain a cadaver lab, the cost and infrastructure required to maintain that is very difficult. Not only is there the challenge of having people’s bodies donated, but there’s a lot of challenge around all the environmental concerns.”
- Training speakers via the web. Virtual speaker training has taken off with tremendous success. Its expected growth trend will continue through 2025, putting attendees in the driver’s seat as VR will immerse healthcare professionals (HCPs) in unprecedented ways. They’ll mimic implanting new biologics, demonstrate the microvascular complications of diabetes, and visualize the attack on cancerous tumors.
- IBM’s Watson Healthcare Integration. The future of smart beyond anything we’ve ever seen in healthcare is here. Watson allows clinicians/surgeons to virtually explore problems by visually interpreting data that may lead to groundbreaking/innovative solutions. An oncologist will soon use IBM’s Watson to read 40 million documents in 15 seconds, solving some of the world’s biggest problems in a fraction of the time. New genetic links to diseases will be discovered and therapies to target these diseases will make AR very real.
- VR and live streaming options have now become reality. With video healthcare marketing gaining millions more views each year than the year before, there are new avenues to evolve your programs. Improving engagement and incorporating social media and VR stations at venues will provide more options for HCPs to select methods of education that most closely align with how they best learn.
Making predictions about the course of technology in healthcare education is risky. Some ideas come to fruition and some die in development. Still, it pays to forecast what’s coming this year to prepare your marketing strategies accordingly. And for those of us science fiction fanatics, it’s fun to think about what’s coming next.
