I was invited to be an innovator speaker at November's
innovation session at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. What I was talking about was our experiences implementing PeriopSim for iPad and HTC VIVE inside US and Canadian Hospitals. I was also chosen to sit at the innovators table because of the last 10 years building over 100 mobile enterprise applications as CEO of Conquer Mobile and spending 5 years at the "Harvard of Video Game Making" - Electronic Arts.
The attendees were open, willing to try new things and think outside the box. There was a lot of learning going on among attendees and the invited innovators. The invited innovators brought a fresh and unique perspective to the many real world challenges facing Health Professions Education.
PeriopSim has taken an approach that is different to most of the innovators in at the workshop. We don’t provide education to students enrolled in health professions schools, rather we provide unique training and educational opportunities to practicing clinicians in the hospitals. This is something that may change overtime, however the problems facing mastery learning and continuing education as it exists today is being solved in the hospitals.
These were some of my key takeaways from our day spent at the National Academies:
- Everyone that attended was amazingly passionate about education with a strong desire to make learning something new safer for the learner, the educator and patient.
- We need to build more tools to support effective use of our software by the clinical educators. We focus so much on the learner and forget that the educator is responsible for integration and implementation of novel software solutions despite often being overworked. They can use the support!
- There needs to be a straightforward integration platform to connect emerging and existing innovative tools where the educators and administrators can find them.
- The problems educators are facing include: faculty and preceptor shortages, how to support mastery and individualized learning and tools for developing faculty.
One of the most visible topics discussed was the need to move beyond minimum competencies found in typical practice settings. Instead, clinicians should be be able to demonstrate mastery before moving on to actual clinical practice. There was consensus that achievement rates below 100% on competency based evaluation simply are not acceptable for contemporary practice.
Another topic of robust discussion involved mirroring training paradigms found in other industries, specifically the aerospace model of annual evaluation to maintain and evaluate skill mastery to maintain license. Pilots have a physical and a test yearly. Why doesn’t the healthcare system support this for our clinicians? This is especially important when you look at the
medical errors that occur each year.
I feel it's important to mention we spoke about applications using the latest technology buzzwords including AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, Machine Vision, AR, MR, VR, Game Design and Block Chain. These are all on the product roadmaps of Education Technology and Corporate training organizations with real groundbreaking learning implications.
Special thank you to all of the other innovators that were at the event. It was so great to hear your stories as you’ve all been in the game longer that us. Super shout out to
Bill Kelly @ ReelDX who is moving into new territory like us using live patient footage to create educational experiences.
I️ am honoured to say this brought me to DC for the first time and I️ really enjoyed the opportunity.
Watch videos on YouTube from the entire workshop and here are the ones I participated in showcasing our work with www.periopsim.com. We were lucky to have about 1/2 the room try PeriopSim & VR with the HTC VIVE for the first time!