Extended Reality in Healthcare

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are part of the broader “Extended Reality (XR)” environment that is ever more present in today’s tech-driven world. Healthcare is a sector that has seen significant recent benefits from both VR and AR.

While both VR and AR provide experiences that are not available in the real world alone and both respond to real-time changes (such as user movement), there are some distinct differences:

  • VR is the use of technology to completely immerse users in an alternative computer-generated reality, typically experienced through a full headset.
  • AR instead overlays technology onto real-world environments to enhance user experience. It incorporates some of the actual real-world elements into the experience to blend real-world and virtual.

VR is probably best known for its presence in the gaming industry. However, it is increasingly being used in the healthcare industry to assist in a variety of areas. VR is helping to train surgeons, identify early Alzheimer’s and Schizophrenia, heal brain injuries, treat depression, phobias, and PTSD, assist with pain management, and teach social skills to children with autism. Additionally, with the COVID-19 quarantine orders, more people are experiencing VR through therapy in an effort to control stress and anxiety and teach mindfulness and relaxation. VR is a more scalable approach when resources are stretched thin and access to physicians is limited.

AR in healthcare has made recent strides in areas of visualization – both for surgery and to assist healthcare providers in finding patient veins. With AR, doctors are able to project images onto a patient’s body in real-time.

XR, which encompasses both, has been proven to have many advantages, but it comes with its share of challenges as well. Creating a truly immersive experience requires integration of multiple components, all capturing enormous amounts of data points meant to be analyzed and understood together. This requires underlying technologies that can scale rapidly, manage large datasets, and provide significant computing resources on demand. When used in healthcare settings, the reliability and resilience of these supporting functions is critical. Life and death challenges might arise in these areas if there are connectivity issues or other technical limitations.

Additionally, because XR is relatively new, the learning curve is still steep. The availability of people trained to develop, test, and implement spatial computing capabilities is limited. And the challenge is only made worse by the lack of standardization across the technologies being developed. Early adopters often find themselves forced to buy-in to a particular vendor’s overall ecosystem of components and capabilities. This vendor “lock-in” can limit future expansion or integration with other areas.

Without proper education during deployment, the risks of underutilization or errors increase and can lead to increased costs of the technology across the board. The impact of an incorrect usage or design flaw can also result in adverse health outcomes, both for patients and practitioners.

Companies can improve confidence in the success of their XR innovations through a comprehensive digital strategy. Initial experimentation and exploration is often done in sandboxes where existing technical standards and corporate structure don’t hinder the development of innovative ideas and possibilities. Companies that are successful in implementing these innovations will have steps in their innovation process that ensure alignment or adjustments to their overall technology strategy and architecture so that integration and information management capabilities are enhanced. Implementation planning must ensure that the new technology is applied to the existing processes in a way that brings value to patients and providers.

We hope you enjoyed our article! Comment below and share your thoughts on this blog post.

Author

Christina Carson

Christina Carson

Could a “platform company” disrupt your industry? Odds are it already has.

If your company is not a platform company, or actively in the process of becoming one, your livelihood is at risk. What do I mean by “platform company”?

A platform company is a company that creates value by facilitating exchanges and transactions between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers. Contrast that with a traditional company that operates on a linear model that creates value in the form of goods or services and then sells them to someone downstream in their supply chain.

Uber and Lyft are platform companies, Yellow Cab is not. Airbnb and VRBO versus Wyndham Hotel Group or Marriott International, and even eBay versus Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

A platform company DOES NOT rely on inventory, manufactured goods, and products, etc.

Uber doesn’t own any cars, Airbnb doesn’t own any hotel rooms, and eBay doesn’t own any warehouses full of art and artifacts.

A platform company DOES rely on two paradigms of Digital Transformation: the transaction and the platform.

The transaction is the scalable and repeatable process that creates and consumes value between producers and consumers. The platform is what enables consumers and producers to find each other and to enforce the standards and rules for those same transactions. Platforms don’t cut out the middleman, they digitize them and take a cut of every transaction. They enable consumers to communicate directly with providers and that is what drives their value and their market share.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling services, products, or content, or providing a platform to allow developers to build software, or hosting a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game, once you realize what part(s) of your industry can be a platform, digital transformation then becomes a matter of execution. Your company’s survival may not be assured but it will certainly have a better chance than if it continues delivering on the linear business model.

When you’re ready to disrupt your industry and breathe new life into your business let us know. We can help.

Author

Joe Knape

Joe Knape

Responding to COVID-19 A Client Success Story

Starting in January, companies around the world were faced with a mysterious disease that quickly morphed into the Covid-19 pandemic. This research report highlights some thoughtful, timely, creative, and well-executed steps that one of our healthcare clients has taken that we believe will be helpful in guiding your own ongoing response:

Customers

It goes without saying that your customers are the most vital part of your business. Here’re some ideas about how they can be creatively engaged in these uncertain times:

– Communicate across new channels

  • Besides the usual channels of emails, websites, mailers, where carefully crafted messages were delivered periodically, inhouse experts in medicine and patient management were utilized to create concise and informative Video messages, which were then distributed widely
  • Spearheading a social media challenge, our client leveraged a custom hashtag and TikTok to engage young people all over the world resulting in more than 2.5 billion views - one of the largest brand campaigns the platform has seen to date
– Collaborate with new partners
  • Our client already had a popular mental health application suitable for most digital platforms. During the current crisis, they decided to make it free for all members.

– Call and reach out

  • Our client made sure to understand their members and proactively reach out to the most vulnerable to provide support services for those that might have been struggling to pay for necessities such as food
– Think outside the box when it comes to approaching and engaging new entities
  • The company cold-called dozens of the largest retail and apparel companies to coordinate and facilitate the delivery of PPE and other life-saving equipment around the country.

– Go big when possible: Facing long waits for outsourced COVID-19 test results, our client leveraged existing capabilities to build and staff its own state-of-the-art lab capable of performing 10,000 tests a day

– Built and deployed a “Volunteer Portal” to help coordinate projects and organizations needing volunteers with individuals with the needed skills and availability.

– Made tools available that allowed for a COVID-19 “self-assessment”

– Implemented a chat feature to provide for and enhance e-visits.

Your employees are also dealing with a new work-from-home paradigm. Some key considerations for the new work and employee-employer relationship:

– Validate and vet the set of tools to be used, when to be used, how to be used; and anticipate the volume. Host training sessions around tools.

– Clarify tools to be used and to be avoided.

– Ensure that data in transit is protected and encrypted when necessary using encryption in transit tools (e.g. VPNs, SSL, HTTPS, et. al.)

– Don’t forget the impact to speed and connectivity issues for communications now that ISPs are being stretched due to additional traffic (should you consider easing timeout or retry restrictions?)

– Put in changes to maintain security, and integrity of the network, all while ensuring the stability of the environment. For example, our client:

Staff

The company’s staff were the front-line of response and adaptation, and innovation with them was critical.

– The organization helped socialize how many unplanned expenses there would be. It may be too late during a crisis, but preparing for such an eventuality is what Governance and Risk Management is about

– Proactive hiring: While putting new hiring on pause may be the first reaction, understand that this is also the time to find talent for that hard to fill post, or for the business opportunities that are going to arise after the worst is over

– Care for the current employees. Our client launched two new programs consisting of:

Technical

Securing your IT is now more critical than ever. Even without the rise in risks due to Covid19 related hacking attempts, now is the time to ensure your system reliability and security. Here are some points to consider:

– Should you consider a Change Freeze? Stopping all non-critical development allows you to focus on mission-critical items and push out less important changes to a future date

  • Define what a Change Freeze implies
  • What is the approval/ denial process and ownership structure?
  • What is exempt?
  • Develop a new timeline

– Conversely, can resources that have been made idle due to change freezes, the shutdown of non-critical functions, etc. be tasked with addressing technical debt and refactoring activities that may be impractical while systems are running at or near capacity?

– Start monitoring types of attacks (phishing, malware, imposters, for example)

– If possible, obtain the business continuity plans of your vendor partners to find ways to work together and ensure the security and stability of your supply chain.

– Keep your environments stable: Are you prepared for the extra bandwidth and security required for staff working from home?

– Plan for quick lifting of the change freeze to prevent future business impacts

– Proactively test applications and infrastructure to ensure they can handle the surge that will be happening when businesses, members, clients, and others start coming back online.

– Review and modify applications and workflows to improve efficiency and delivery in the new “work from home” paradigm.

Your employees are also dealing with a new work-from-home paradigm. Some key considerations for the new work and employee-employer relationship:

  • Validate and vet the set of tools to be used, when to be used, how to be used; and anticipate the volume. Host training sessions around tools.
  • Clarify tools to be used and to be avoided.
  • Ensure that data in transit is protected and encrypted when necessary using encryption in transit tools (e.g. VPNs, SSL, HTTPS, et. al.)
  • Don’t forget the impact to speed and connectivity issues for communications now that ISPs are being stretched due to additional traffic (should you consider easing timeout or retry restrictions?)
  • Put in changes to maintain the security and integrity of the network, all while ensuring the stability of the environment. For example, our client:
    • Added firewall blocking to block selected sites (AV, Games, etc)
    • Increased security classification policies to segment devices
    • Identified managed vs unmanaged devices to understand who is coming online remotely
    • Enabled Global Protect Split tunneling for Office 365 network traffic, in order to offload traffic from corporate networks
    • Made network engineering upgrades that allows for Teams video to be carried separately on the network, while preserving bandwidth for critical business needs

– Increase capacity in various areas for the remote workforce:

  • Increase reserve capacity for critical applications and infrastructure
  • Enhance email infrastructure for secure file transfer in mail transport agents for capacity
  • Revisit and simplify access process and access for remote user onboarding requests
  • Closely monitor VPN utilization

Author

Kunal Nagpal

Kunal Nagpal