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Health Scholars Delivers Cloud-Based, VR-Ready Training Platform With VR Simulations, Simulation Management, And Readiness Reporting Solutions

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Health Scholars was founded by healthcare professionals who recognized the need to advance immersive education and clinical training effectiveness. Below is our recent interview with Dr. Brian Gillett, President & Chief Medical Officer at Health Scholars:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Health Scholars?

A: Our mission is to advance healthcare simulation through virtualization, making experience-based training scalable, accessible and affordable for public health and safety professionals to help reduce medical errors and improve patient safety.

Based in Denver, Colorado we’ve developed an all-in-one platform for the management, delivery and analysis of blended medical training, including VR simulations. Our VR applications scale critical resuscitation, peri-operative and obstetrical training, and enables repeatable practice of proper workflows as well as critical soft skills like communications, situational awareness and critical thinking.

Q: You’ve recently raises $17m in Series D round. What do you plan to do with those funds?

A: The new investment round will enable us to continue to introduce and expand new virtual technologies in both the Hospital and Public Safety market allowing for greater accessibility, scalability and immersion at up 80% less cost than traditional simulation training methods.

Specifically, we will use funding to expand our VR content library, further develop the virtual learning platform to facilitate enterprise scale deployments and analytics, grow our go-to-market resources and strengthen our IP base.

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Q: You’ve also launched first VR ACLS training simulation for first responders; could you tell us something more?

A: We released our Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) VR training in January to help address the specific training needs of EMS providers and was made possible with a Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program User Interface grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Partnership and the State of Colorado’s Advanced Industries Accelerator Program. The VR simulation was designed in accordance with American Heart Association guidelines and input from local EMS partners, allowing providers to play the role of the team lead running an in-home code scenario. Providers receive thirteen total scenarios that reflect cardiac and non-cardiac arrest scenarios and using voice direction must identify rhythms and direct virtual team members to shock, give meds, and/or perform CPR as necessary. The simulation provides extensive practice on communication, situational awareness, decision-making and competencies such as accurate hospital notification all while undergoing real-world distractions they’d experience in the field.

ACLS certification is required every two years, so effective, scalable training is vital for all EMS agencies to provide. For small or rural agencies, the volume of cardiac emergencies can be inconsistent, creating a need for affordable refresher training. By virtualizing ACLS training, agencies of all sizes can easily integrate an immersive training modality, plus VR easily scales to any number of providers, is at least 50% less than the cost of traditional physical simulation and provides performance reporting that is actionable.

Q: What types of training do you provide to your clients?

A: We currently provide three VR simulation applications: ACLS for First Responders, ACLS for In-Hospital Clinicians, and Fire in The OR which trains clinicians on proper surgical fire prevention and management to mitigate risks and reduce liability costs. This year we’ll be releasing several more simulations focused on resuscitation, obstetrical emergency, peri-operative, and emergency preparedness training.

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Q: Why VR? Why now?

A: Scale and frequency issues are what virtual reality can help address. And in a world of ever-increasing healthcare costs, geographic expansion, and population growth the need for highly trained medical professionals is exponential. VR enables professional medical providers to practice competencies in real-world, risk-free settings while enabling instructors to see decisions and how they then react to the consequences. VR finally affords the healthcare sector a mechanism for scaling high-impact experiential training and we’re keen to help find training gaps and improve survival rates across the board within different areas of engagement from medical professionals.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: We will continue to focus on the often-overlooked low occurrence/high risk clinical situations where effective training undoubtedly mitigates threats to patient safety. Ultimately our vision is to be a catalyst for clinical training transformation. There is a massive evidence standard in health care when it comes to devices and drugs; however, this standard is lacking when it comes to ensuring the maintenance of critical competencies for people who provide the care. This is due to the practical impossibility of rolling out high yield trainings with a meaningful cadence of participation across health systems. Also, there’s no objective way to measure training effectiveness at scale across large provider populations. Thus, we are changing this by making available, to any size healthcare or public safety organization, a comprehensive enterprise platform for managing, orchestrating and scaling XR training content. Our platform can disseminate performance metrics and trends as well as enable cross disciplinary collaboration and analysis, which is necessary to provided targeted training. Health Scholars is not just a VR training company. We’re a medical innovations company, so our future will consist of finding new ways to scale and standardize immersive learning and relevant performance data and demonstrating how XR training positively impacts patient outcomes.

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