Virtual Reality video teaches medical professionals the best practices in treating Covid-19 patients

Kevin Ching, a physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was working with Covid-19 patients during the pandemic and realized it was very important to share the hands-on knowledge they had acquired to other medical workers. He had the idea of creating a Virtual Reality video that demonstrated best practices in treating Covid-19 patients, especially for training medical personnel in remote areas without teaching hospitals or with less access to teaching materials.

So, Ching reached out to Kyle Cassidy, a digital design specialist at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication and together they assembled a team to make it happen. Ching worked with colleagues to draft the script for the video and Cassidy gathered the team responsible for filming, editing and selecting the medical professionals to be in the video.
The final result is an immersive 360º training video that shows a doctor treating a Covid-19 patient (represented through a mannequin) suffering from respiratory failure. The video can be watched on Youtube and which allows people to click and drag the image, to survey all 360º degrees of the set. I can also be viewed with a virtual reality headset, which allows the viewer to feel like the in the room.

It was very important for the video to be shot in Virtual Reality, since that technology can convey information that cannot be shown in a normal video. “In a lot of medical teaching, there is an in-person aspect to it, which often requires people to look in different directions, to be able to physically touch something, to see things move, to be able to make decisions, and see how those decisions affect outcomes”, explains Cassidy.

He adds that “the video is geared towards medical workers but it can be viewed by anybody who's curious about what it's like to be in an actual room in the ER when a COVID-19 patient comes in and needs to be intubated and put on a ventilator”.

Ching is very satisfied with the final result, stating that It completely fulfilled the original objective: “This video sets forth best practices for crisis teams developing resuscitation protocols and workflows in a clear, concise manner. It presents evolving standards of care not yet found in medical literature but developed through real-time, clinical practice, based on the experiences of emergency providers working with the most critically ill COVID-19 patients in New York City and Philadelphia.”

Adapted from: https://www.library.upenn.edu/blogs/libraries-news/better-care-covid-pat...
https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/07/virtual-reality-coronavirus-treatm...

Video: https://youtu.be/nj18ZWnprBs

https://youtu.be/nj18ZWnprBs