Teaching Physicians Empathetic Overtures

"We’ve been working with healthcare organizations for several years, but the pandemic has created really specific challenges that technology is helping to solve. It’s no longer safe or practicable to have 30 medics in a room with an actor, honing their clinical soft-skills. With our virtual patient technology, we’ve created an extremely realistic and repeatable experience that can provide feedback in real time. This means clinicians and students can continue to learn valuable skills."

"Right now, communication with patients can be very difficult. There’s a lot of PPE involved and patients are often on their own. Having healthcare staff who are skilled in handling these situations can therefore make a huge difference to that patient’s experience."

"Complaints can happen anywhere, but in health care, they're amplified tenfold because you're doing things like breaking bad news or explaining a diagnosis to a patient who may not have medical understanding." 

Dr.Alex Young, orthopedic surgeon, Bristol, U.K.

 

"We've been using Virti's technology in our intensive care unit to help train staff who have been drafted in to deal with COVID-19 demand."

"The videos which we have created and uploaded are being accessed on the Virti platform by nursing staff, physiotherapists and Operational Department Practitioners [ODPs] to orient them in the new environment and reduce their anxiety. The tech has helped us to reach a large audience and deliver formerly labour-intensive training and teaching which is now impossible with social distancing."

"In the future, West Suffolk will consider applying Virti tech to other areas of hospital practice."

Tom Woollard, West Suffolk Hospital Clinical Skills and Simulation Tutor

The Virti technology is intended to be used remotely to minimize in-person training during the pandemic.  Courtesy: Virti

"I was looking for kind of some professional development stuff to keep me occupied [during a COVID-related interregnum of unemployment]."

"After suddenly having a few months off, it's easy to get a little rusty."

"[Those in-person scenarios -- where actors are employed to help in communication training, pretending to be ill -- can] feel a bit forced; fake patients] feel much more authentic than somebody making it up as they go along."

Dr.Jack Boulter, musculoskeletal podiatrist, Exeter, England

In the medical profession physicians are renowned for their perceived lack of empathy, of any kind of human interest in the patients they are faced daily, beyond reacting with them as 'cases', to be diagnosed, treated, prescribing medications, or referring them onward to other medical practitioners. Communication skills tinctured with social and personal niceties are not their bailiwick. Understandable, since they're focused on health and medicine in general, not individual patients in particular, and sometimes it's difficult to put the two together.

So difficult, that it's largely bypassed and over time begins to appear from physician to patient, somewhat like an attitude of psychological retreat and indifference. Of course if a doctor became psychologically involved and too empathetic to a patient's health plight they run the risk of becoming too emotionally involved, rendering them incapable of unaffected professionalism. In earlier times when doctors were generally regarded by the non-medical public as elevated beings whose knowledge was capable of lifting patients out of sickness -- demi-gods as it were -- this wasn't an issue.

We live in less formal times now, where physicians are generally viewed through the informal lens of just being like anyone else but with the addition of a medical background; to be relied upon to be certain, but with the further expectation that they will treat their patients with the consideration of feeling along with the diagnosis, expressed in a tone and language readily absorbed. Person-to-person in point of fact, in today's relaxed social atmosphere of a levelled social platform.

Busy professionals as they are, in a demanding job that requires them to diagnose symptoms, look after back-to-back patient presentations, fill out medical records; absorb long and exhausting work hours, in an atmosphere of grave responsibility where an error can lead to a costly lawsuit, this additional lack of attention to doctor-patient relationships is hardly surprising. A distance born partially of over-stimulated tasking. There has been a lash-back however, with studies indicating that people feel ignored, leaving a doctor-patient interaction frustrated and lacking reassurance.

 

Courtesy, Virti

 

At a time when the global pandemic's demands has the health community searching for ways to better communicate even as they become deeply involved in trying to completely understand the damage that
SARS-CoV-2 inflicts on its victims, it is understood that people are looking not only for treatment but for comforting communication. Dr.Young involved himself in seeking a solution to the problem through technological innovation with the assistance of artificial intelligence. 

His startup, Virti, now supplies "virtual patients" so hospitals and their personnel can be taught to improve their communication interactions with patients. A number of alternatives are available with software that can be employed on a smartphone or computer, but with greater immersion, virtual reality headsets can be used for training sessions. Once completed, doctors are given scores based on their reactions to the training; questions asked the AI; accuracy of diagnosis resulting, speed in concluding the test assignment.

The Health Education Center at University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, tutors future clinicians on communication and reasoning skills through the company's Virti technology. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angles became another client, and then decided to invest in Virti to help the startup assign a sales team and improve its analytical software. Cedars-Sinai medics are trained on coronavirus-related processes through the Virti software. When clinicians ask the animated human to describe its symptoms, the AI generates a relevant response.

There is another role -- for virtual patients in dealing with implicit bias occurring when staff reaches unconscious assumptions -- addressed by the company by enabling hospitals to customize the patient's skin colour, age, height or sex. Digital faces reflect photographs of various actors and other professionals with up to 60 variations available. With Virti, the need by communications training in health care to rely on actors to play the patients' role has been replaced.