The National University Hospital (NUH) is one of the largest hospitals in Singapore and a major referral centre with over 50 medical, surgical and dental specialties. Each year, the Hospital attends to more than one million patients. The focus of the hospital is on patient safety and good clinical outcomes. These values play a key role in the training of doctors, nurses, allied health and other healthcare professionals.
Need for a digital learning environment to ensure patient safety
One of the crucial challenges in the health care sector today is patient safety. As a vast amount of accidents happen in hospital environments daily, patients are prone to high risks. The current education system in Singapore offers little help for the issue, as health care graduates are often inadequately prepared for collaborative work and patient security protocols.
The National University Hospital of Singapore has tackled the issue by arranging patient security workshops for on-boarding personnel. However, setting up and managing workshops places a great strain on time and resources. Furthermore, the frequency of training sessions is inadequate to ensure all new personnel attend and complete the training before they start working. NUH asked for our help in creating a learning- and test environment for patient safety that encompasses the critical components of the workshop curriculum.
What was delivered?
We created a concept and prototype for an immersive 360-panorama-based game system, where students learn in a simulated hospital environment enhanced with a fun factor. The immersive 360 environment enhances the user’s information uptake and simulation of a real hospital environment prepares students for real security issues. The game system keeps users hooked and up to speed on their progress until they have completed the training. For ensuring successful user experience a “virtual assistant”, an interactive chatbot offering instructions and hints for users, was introduced in the system.
For monitoring student engagement and the functionality of the system, we created a user analytics -based interface for administrators. Utilizing an interactive dashboard, administrators can drill into the user data and keep track of both student and system performance.
More time for patient work increases safety
Operating automatically, the system returns key personnel from teaching to their primary assignments like patient work. Administrators can also make sure that new employees complete the training before they start working on the ground. This has a major positive impact on patient safety.
The concept is fully scalable and can be used to mitigate security related or other pedagogic issues in any work environment. As the learning is game-based it increases the motivation to learn and the tests will be completed on schedule.
The concept and prototype of the system was awarded with the Runner-up SPARK award at the iN.LAB Innovplus challenge in Singapore.
For monitoring student engagement and the functionality of the system, we created a user analytics -based interface for administrators. Utilizing an interactive dashboard, administrators can drill into the user data and keep track of both student and system performance.
