Med Students Get Training In Second Life Hospitals 126
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover Magazine reports that although medical simulations have been around for a long time, medical schools like Imperial College London are starting to use virtual hospitals in Second Life so students can learn their way around an O.R. before they enter the real thing. The students can also test their knowledge in the Virtual Respiratory Ward by interviewing patient avatars, ordering tests, diagnosing problems, and recommending treatment. 'The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"
Re:Tactile? (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA, or at least the submission.
Nobody is talking about diagnosing patients on SL. They're talking about using for training, of the sort that's currently being performed on dummies. The supposed advantage is that in SL you can make a dummy that reacts to things being done to it much cheaper than a real one, which would need to have some fancy robotics installed into it.
I don't know if this is actually helpful or not, but it's got nothing to do with diagnosing people through SL.
Interesting step in future health care (Score:2, Informative)
It's interesting that folks are looking into the possibilities. Perhaps it will find itself useful for training and in other different ways.
One idea came to mind:
Health care is a hot topic in the US. I'm old enough to remember family doctors making house calls, in the late 60's and very early 70's, in my home town in upstate NY. Judging by the lack of local medical help in the rural town where I am now, there aren't enough doctors to go around. Some towns have sponsored (new?) doctors, paying their education bill, providing facilities, a place to live, and other basic necessities.
Suppose more communities did this, creating a larger market for doctors. Such virtualization tools could enable doctors to make house calls again, and even give them some side income. Doctors could "see" patients via SL, perhaps for $L, during slow times between RL, local patients.
Develop an inexpensive USB dongle that can measure pulse, BP, temp, etc, and distribute them widely and with a lifetime guarantee. Have it capable of storing medical records for a family.
There will be privacy issues, the storage and sharing of medical records, proxies, filters, and trust, but those are things that will need to be dealt with for any "Health Care Reform" to happen. No more filling out paperwork while in the waiting room, but the internet has a great "magazine rack".
Re:Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:2, Informative)
>I'm currently a 4th year medical student and can tell you from personal experience that nothing... absolutely nothing... can replace face-to-face training
>with real-life patients.
Of course not. Do you think that claim is on the table? Do you have anything against supplemental information?
I think a virtual training room could help with USMLE STEP or OSCE preparedness, don't you?
The "virtual patients" are not automata, they are merely a communication medium for the same standardized patients you get in your CBI's as an MS1/MS2.
As a 4th year student, have you already forgotten what that experience was like? MS2's are grateful for *any* resource. By the time you get used to the CBI routine, they take it away from you, just like the way they take away the cadavers pretty much as soon as you get used to them, whoops, that's the end of anatomy.
That said, I don't think the Linden world offers a good way to simulate fine-grained interaction with the world. It's essentially a text chat client augmented with flash video and voice chat. If you don't think flash video is an appropriate tool to supplement medical education, I won't argue, but you're at odds with the state of affairs in medical colleges today, where stuff like video and powerpoint presentations and podcasts are quite prevalent.
There's nothing wrong with putting an interactive layer on top of that.
I don't know where you got the idea that anyone was trying to replace med school with Second Life...
As an MS4, you really don't have time to be thinking about stuff like this. Get to work, silly.