Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Hospitals can appeal to patients via virtual worlds, says IT expert

Note from Editor:

If Hospitals are starting to use this technology, how long will it be before forward-thinking senior housing owner/operators start doing the same thing??




Palomar Pomerado Health of San Diego, Calif. , plans to open a new, high-tech hospital in 2011, but according to Palomar's chief technology officer, an IT-driven community outreach effort has already begun. "We want to 'break the mold' on leveraging technology in the new facility, so it made sense to build a virtual model of the hospital online," said Orlando Portale, Palomar's CTO.

Portale spoke here Thursday at the 2008 Physician-Computer Connection Symposium, an annual event put on by the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems.
Palomar's proposed brick-and-mortar facility, called Palomar Medical Center West, will have 453 beds, cover approximately 1.2 million square feet and cost almost $800 million. Portale said the hospital would teem with state-of-the-art technology, including operating suites with robotics technology and patient rooms that could be quickly reconfigured to meet the needs of a patient's changing health status.
The new medical center's online equivalent, termed "Virtual Palomar West," has similar features, which anyone with Internet access can tour via the virtual world of Second Life.

A creation of San Francisco-based Linden Labs, Second Life has more than 14 million registered users, and Portale told his audience that creating a presence in the popular three-dimensional virtual world was an easy decision for the health system.
"Second Life is the leading metaverse platform," Portale said. "We can simulate a model of the new hospital and offer people in the community a chance to see it before it is built, and we can also begin to simulate potential events in the virtual world."

The "metaverse" is a term coined by writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. It refers to a virtual world where humans interact with each other via avatars in a three-dimensional "metaphor" of the real world.

Portale told the AMDIS audience that interaction with patients in public virtual worlds like Second Life - and in private virtual worlds and meeting spaces created by companies like Forterra Systems and Qwaq - would likely be a critical part of health systems' outreach efforts in the future.

"Conceptual and virtual simulation in healthcare is not going to go away, but will probably grow," he said

By Richard Pizzi, Associate Editor MedTech Publishing