When the students at
Lancaster General College of Nursing and Health Science were children, many of
their living rooms were likely transformed into doctor's offices. These
future medical students would check the pulse and take the temperature
of their dolls and action figures to determine the plastic prognosis. In
their innocence, these would-be healers couldn't have realized that one
day, playing doctor to Betsy Wetsy and GI-Joe would become a major part
of their medical training. Going from imagination to reality can be
surreal but, like many serious game environments, saving fake bodies may
help save the real ones. In short, playtime is over.
This week,
tech transfer professionals from the
Innovation Transfer Network visit
Lancaster General Hospital, where doctors in the Clinical Simulation Lab
are using robotic mannequins to train medical students. These dolls
breath, talk, seize, show a pulse and even run a fever to train young
doctors in everything from IV placement to open heart surgery. According
to Simulation Learning director Joe Corvino, the sims are as real as it
gets.
"They breathe, they blink, they talk, we can have them
cry, chest rise, heart sounds, lung sounds, bowel sounds," says
Corvino. "Through this technology, we can put our students into
realistic situations where they are presented with a patient, they have
to do a basic assessment and from that assessment, they have to
determine a plan of care, communicate that plan to other team members,
and then they need to treat that patient through anything from oral
medication to IV medication, knowing that the patient could seize, shock
or pace and may even require CPR."
A burgeoning technology
growth sector in Pennsylvania, serious games and simulations have become
increasingly prevalent in life-and-death industries like medicine and
the military. Chronicling their growth is the Innovation Transfer
Network, whose Simulation and Serious Games Xchange group meets
quarterly to review potential projects in the simulation industry. The
visit to Lancaster General on Sept. 8 will be a fact-finding
mission where the group will review the success of the robot mannequin
patients and consider possible commercialization options and potential
partnerships. Corvino and his team welcome ITN and look forward to
discussing the future of medical simulations in PA.
"We
are really looking to see if there is some interest out there in
developing a partnership, to maybe go into business looking from a
safety perspective, using simulation for safety standards that need to
be met within an organization," says Corvino. "We're also using
simulation here for team building exercises and crisis resource
management. Knowing who is in your team, what your responsibility is and
then being able to competently carry out that role in a crisis
situation. These are focuses I could see being developed through a
meeting such as this."
Source: Joe Corvino, Lancaster General College of Nursing and Health ScienceWriter: John Steele