By Frances Huang
On World Safety Say, HST (Health Smart Taiwan) and JCT (Joint Commission of Taiwan) organized a webinar to discuss about how to improve patient safety by applying innovative technology on clinical training. During the past 2 years, many things had changed, especially the distance between people. For health care workers, the most important part in their career training is clinical training. Due to COVID-19, traditional clinical training had faced challenged for health care workers need to keep safe distance between patients and the clinical training reluctantly have to stop for most of the time.
Technology takes an important role in the past 2 years, Dr. Ying-Hsin Chen, Director of Department of Emergency Medicine in Show Chwan Memorial Hospital, had shared his experience on applying AR and VR technology in building a Simulation Teaching System for disaster disposal. Via the mobile based app, health care worker can learn and practice how to co-op with different kind of emergency situation and execute the CPR for patients. It allows user to have immersive experience, improve their ability of decision making when come into emergency situations. Disaster simulation training used to take times and need many people for a single simulation event, but now it can be done in mobile. Health care workers can practice flexibly according to their time arrangement. Dr. Chen called it "Serious Game", for the feature of gamification and diversity of emergency situation can be choose by user. The feature of gamification motivates health care workers to more involved in practice and improve their clinical skill, especially the ability of deliver CPR+AED to patient.
Dr. Tsuen-Chiuan Tsai, Co-founder of Innova Medical Technology Inc., had introduced V-DxM and how well it applied in health care worker learning system. Due to COVID-19, health care workers are hard to learn from the patients as they did in the past. V-DxM is an simulation environment which included virtual hospital and virtual patient, the condition of virtual hospital almost included everything that can be found in a real hospital. Heath care workers can have conversation with the virtual patient,
perform a physical, image, laboratory examination, just like how we did in the past. The only difference is it's a virtual environment. Nowadays, health care workers learn from virtual patient, improving their clinical knowledge, skill and ability of decision making. A good health care workers usually spent time on clinical training, V-DxM system not only provide virtual clinical environment but also can be adopted as a alternative solution for examine the knowledge and skill of a health care worker. Clinical training now can be flexible, without the limitation of space and time, workers can practice their clinical skill anytime they want and form a group discussion online according to their needs. Technology had saved times and providing huge amount of content which hard to simulated in real world.
AR and VR technology had been adopted in many fields nowadays, Dr. Ying-Ying Yang, Director of Department of Medical Education from Taipei Veterans General Hospital, had applied VR in Clinical education for health care workers can view the tracheotomy form different angle instead of standing around the patient while doctor deliver the treatment. It also allows patient's family to know more about why their family need a tracheotomy. Dr. Min-Liang Wang, CEO of Taiwan Main Orthopedic Biotechnology Co., Ltd., applied the AR and VR technology for surgical smart glasses. It combines all the data that a doctor needs while deliver a surgery a patient, no more dashboard is needed in operating room. Doctor can have their preoperative surgical planning information with patient’ physiological information all in the smart surgical glasses.
Though the pandemic situation had tear us apart, most of the learning programs are forced to go online, but thank to the technology, we had conquered the limitation of space and time. Health care workers now can have flexible time practicing their clinical skill, learning from virtual patient, arranging their time more flexible to improve their ability of clinical decision making. All these virtual solutions are aimed to provide diversity and opportunity for workers to practice repeatedly so while they face the clinical situation in reality, they will be more confident about their decision making and secure patient safety.