Signals of Hope for Medical Extended Reality
Medicine is innovative. It’s fast. It challenges the status quo. It pushes the limits of what ought to be possible.
Healthcare is not.
While engineers at MIT have designed stamp-sized stickers that can provide continuous ultrasounds of the body, healthcare is still operating with fax machines.
That’s the unfortunate reality of working in the healthcare industry. No matter how advanced medicine becomes, the healthcare system remains bogged down by inefficiency and outdated approaches. We could spend a full blog post analyzing why that is (starting with poorly aligned incentives that set regulatory mandates up for failure, case in point Electronic Health Records), but that’s not the point of this piece. The point of this piece is to justify hope for medical extended reality. Namely, because we’re finally seeing healthcare catch up to where medicine has been since the 90s.
If you’ve read other pieces on this site, you know I have a particular fascination and obligation toward exploring extended reality (XR). To be clear, when I use “XR,” I mean the inclusive term for -
Virtual Reality: immerses users in a fully artificial, digital environment, most commonly via VR Headsets like the Quest 2.
Augmented Reality: overlays virtual objects onto the real world to enhance a user’s perceived environment. The worldwide phenomenon, Pokémon GO, is one of the most well-known examples. Furniture companies like IKEA and Wayfair both use augmented reality enabling users to view furniture in their homes before they make a purchase.
Mixed Reality: doesn’t just overlay but anchors virtual objects into the real world allowing users to interact with the real world and virtual environment, eventually blurring the lines between what is real and what is not.
The use of these technologies in healthcare can be synthesized into five categories:
Clinical Decision-Making: like using 3D immersive displays to read medical imaging.
Clinical Training: like virtual reality-powered surgery simulations to teach procedures.
Patient-Provider Communication: like using virtual and augmented reality to explain complex medical conditions.
Pain Management & Therapeutic Medicine: like using virtual reality-based treatments to relieve chronic pain.
Mental Health: like the use of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy to address Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
As we know from healthcare, emerging technologies come and go. The ones that have staying power are the ones that become integrated into the reimbursement model, which is why the last few years have been especially hopeful.
In 2020, the FDA cleared the first video game as a prescription medical treatment for attention deficit disorder.
In 2021, the NIH granted $2 million to Rendever, a Boston-based company using VR to support socially isolated seniors.
In 2021, AppliedVR received “breakthrough device designation” from the FDA for their use of VR for the treatment of lower back pain.
Most recently, California’s Pain Patient’s Bill of Rights showed support for non-pharmacological treatments to relieve pain.
These are tiny signals. Like one of those whistles only dogs can hear. But the signal is growing stronger, and eventually, it will be perceptible to the human ear. As we’ve seen in the past, medicine adopts an emerging technology. Those with decent potential gain favor with the FDA, and eventually CMS begins the trend of paying for it. There is hope for medical XR.
These thoughts are my own and do not represent the viewpoints of any company or organization with which I’m affiliated.