Driving greater adoption of cutting-edge medical technology

Surgical training hasn't changed much over the past 100 years. Doctors in training observe experienced surgeons, then they're given more autonomy until they can perform surgery on their own. But according to Sandra Humbles, Vice President of Global Education Solutions for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices, this model is no longer sustainable. "Technology is accelerating the pace of surgical innovation," she says, "and now there's more for a surgeon to learn than ever before."

Justin Barad, MD, agrees. An orthopaedic surgeon and software developer, he founded Osso VR after years of frustration in operating rooms. "There were always new medical devices, but we would literally be Googling how to use them while the patient was on the table," he says. "Learning curve data shows that you have to perform a new procedure 100 times to be proficient. So we often didn't use the new devices for safety reasons – we didn't have time to learn everything well enough."

Some promising new medical devices fail to gain widespread adoption because they require extensive training before surgeons feel comfortable using them. And traditional training methods don't measure or provide objective feedback on a surgeon's performance.”

In 2017, Johnson & Johnson Institute's Education Technology & Innovation team developed VR experiences to train surgeons to implant orthopaedic devices. The experiment showed that VR had promise, but the team couldn't find a way to scale the training until they discovered Oculus for Business and Osso VR.

"The Oculus form factor is more portable than our previous solution," says Tim Mauri, the team's director. "And the Oculus for Business software allows us to provision hundreds if not thousands of training headsets with ease." The team is also making the most of Oculus for Business features such as the Device Manager. "In a highly regulated industry such as healthcare, we have to have the right training content on the right headset at the right time, and the platform helps ensure that."

Osso VR is continuing to expand the training curriculum for the J&J Institute – it includes more than a dozen modules so far. Each one gives surgeons the opportunity to put on Oculus Quest headsets and learn the steps of a procedure in a realistic virtual setting that carries no risk to patients. Justin Barad of Osso VR says that knowing the steps means fewer mistakes and more efficient procedures in the real world. "And we build in checkpoints to ensure that the quality level is there and the surgeon is learning," he says.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, the J&J Institute and Osso VR have seen a spike in requests from academic medical centres that need a way to continue their doctors' training now that elective surgeries are being cancelled. "Medical centres don't want to end up with a shortage of trained surgeons, so there's an urgency to this," says Mauri. "And we have an incredible VR solution powered by Osso VR, supported by Oculus and backed by objective data that verifies its effectiveness."

"With the portability of the Oculus Quest headset and the support of Osso VR, we will be scaling access to our VR training platform quicker than ever before," Sandra Humbles says. "We want to make VR available to every surgeon in every hospital around the world. We're focused on training the procedures and ensuring that our products are used safely in a way that's more time-efficient, cost-effective and measurable."