Medical School Comes to SecondLife

Several months ago I posted a review about the book Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide to Computer Roleplaying Games and my motivation for reading in. I believed then, and believe now, that the underpinnings of computer roleplaying games have a direct application to Health2.0, and that one day EMRs and the like will create compelling new ways for people to understand and become engaged in maintaining their own health and wellbeing.

I also suspected (but only hinted at) the possibility that the technology that has brought games like Grand Theft Auto and Halo 2 to life would also enable virtual representations of patients with real-world conditions to be diagnosed and treated online. In game-speak, one day computer roleplaying game technology and techniques will transfer Health2.0 from a first-person shooter to a MMPORPG.

What never occurred to me was that this sort of application was well underway, until I came across this article at JuniorDr.com:

One of the earliest projects is the Ann Myers Medical Center - a virtual medical school - where medical education gets a unique opportunity to find new ways of training medical students. It was created to test the possibilities of virtual training for real world medical and nursing students. There are dozens of physicians, medical students and animators behind this unique project who pledge their sparetime and money to this idea. AMMC currently has a voluntary staff consisting of consultant specialists, medical students and several nurses. The founder, Doctor Ann Buchanan (Second Life name), a US physician, envisions a hospital where medical students and nurses could be trained. Currently participants focus on patient history, physical examination and telemetry. A virtual mentor gives the students a disease process with which to familiarise themselves and they have to present it to the physician.

Source: "Virtual Doctors: Medical Training in Second Life"

If you think that this is all pie-in-the-sky B.S., think again. Advanced computer graphics are enabling the creation of 3-D models of DNA, internal organs, the human nervous system, and so forth that - while note quite photo-realistic - are for more "real" than two-dimensional cut-away drawings or text descriptions. The collaborative nature of Second Life also makes for a more dynamic and compelling learning experience than is possible even in real-world classrooms; where else can doctors and medical students from six continents diagnose the same patient?

It would seem to me that the next logical step would be to find a way to translate an EMR into a "character sheet" for patients, so that healthcare in Second Life can make the jump from theoretical and didactic to practical and applied. As anyone who has ever played RPGs generally knows, there are a number of models for doing this already - some better-suited to real-world application than others.

From CAD prototyping to accounting the translation of real-world science into mathematical abstractions that have real-world applications is already well underway; it seems to me that as Second Life-like online experiences become more and more common, it is just a matter of time before the line between online gaming and online healthcare disappears altogether.

Related Post: This is as Close as I Get to Being a Hardcore Gamer