For parents worrying that their children will spend too much time this summer playing video games, those gaming skills might come in handy when studying to become an X-ray tech at Mercy College of Ohio.
In preparing students enrolled in the school’s two-year radiologic technology program, Mercy has acquired a virtual reality simulator platform through Virtual Medical Coaching to help them practice performing medical exams, positioning patients, operating X-ray machines, and other tasks.
Dana Eskins, Mercy’s radiological technology program director, in Toledo said the virtual reality simulators provide students additional practice for how they’re supposed to interact with patients. They also help the students learn how to utilize X-ray machines and evaluate the images they produce.
In the few months that the school has employed the devices, she said students are quickly learning what not to do through those virtual world interactions.
“They can make mistakes in the virtual world and it doesn’t hurt anybody,” Ms. Eskins said. “But they won’t be allowed to make those mistakes in the real world, like in their clinical setting.
“But in the virtual world, it allows them to work on their own and make those mistakes, and then they can see it for themselves and know how to fix it,” she added. “And after they log off, they receive an emailed report on how they did.”
Those who spend their downtime playing virtual reality and more traditional video games likely will find the software at Mercy familiar. It operates in a way that is similar to the virtual reality gaming consoles. It has a headset and two handheld controllers that allow users to move around and interact with a virtual patient and medical equipment.
In real life, the student moves around inside a designated training room that’s mostly empty. That is to ensure the student doesn’t accidentally walk into objects — or a wall — while performing tasks within the virtual simulation.
First-year Mercy student Sara Norris hadn’t played such games before being introduced to the school’s virtual reality software roughly a month ago. As a result, it took some time to learn how the controls worked to allow her to interact with people or objects in the simulated world.
On Wednesday, she successfully went through the steps to take a virtual male patient’s chest X-ray. That included taking extra care to ensure the patient and X-ray machine were lined up just right and calculating the correct amount of radiation exposure for such a procedure.
All the while, a laboratory employee was on-hand to watch on a monitor what Ms. Norris was seeing in real-time. Other than some initial difficulty with getting the hand functions to work so she could move the objects as needed, she went through her simulated exercise with little difficulty.
“I wasn’t expecting to be able to do X-rays through VR when I first started,” she said of virtual reality. “It takes a minute to get used to it with the remotes and stuff, but once you get the hang of it it’s pretty easy.”
Ms. Eskins said another benefit of the software is that students can practice with it at home on their laptop computers. That means students operate the controls more like a regular video game instead of getting the real-world immersion experience.
During the pandemic, students would have benefitted from such an option, which she said was one of the college’s motivations in applying for pandemic grant money to acquire the virtual reality equipment and software.
“We were looking at this technology prior to COVID, but then once we were locked down, we realized we had nothing for the students to practice,” Ms. Eskins said. “We wanted something so they wouldn’t lose these skills at home if ever they were again not able to come to labs or clinicals.”
Meanwhile, expect virtual reality to continue making its way into use in classrooms for other medical fields. Coronavirus concerns, along with other logistical issues, have stalled efforts by Mercy nursing simulation coordinator Dawn Borgerson to move forward with using such a program.
But Ms. Borgerson said it’s something that could gain traction soon. “Right now our nursing classes are much larger and so it’s just not realistic to use this with that many students, what with cleaning and everything we’d have to do,” she said. “But absolutely, it’s something we’re looking at.”
First Published June 8, 2022, 6:05 p.m.
