Unleashing Videogame Tech on Medicine

It’s widely known that, statistically, a surgeon’s first 100 high-risk surgical procedures will have far worse outcomes than their next 100 procedures will.

Virtual surgical simulation is the key to solving this problem. Surgical simulation can drastically reduce risk, save lives, and improve outcomes for patients. A new generation of physicians raised on video games continues to be frustrated with surgical simulation that remains decades behind the state-of-the-art entertainment.

An even larger concern is that outmoded design, distribution and business models make high-end medical simulation inaccessible to a large percentage of physicians across the world.

To train on a new procedure or refine technique, today’s surgeons need to travel, often several hours, to a surgical simulation center or a cadaver lab. Beyond just the physical location, simulation centers also cost tens of millions of dollars to build and maintain, and they’re stocked with physical simulators that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you think about it, surgical simulation is not unlike the video games industry of the early 1980s: To play Pac-Man three decades ago, a gamer would grab his/her roll of quarters and travel across town to the arcade, where the high cost of arcade machines and maintenance kept video game entertainment locked in a dedicated building. Today, video arcades are a remnant of the past. A billion gamers now play on the device in their pocket.

Video game technology is light years ahead from where it started. Yet surgical simulation centers remain stuck – spiriting physicians away from patient care and locking virtual training in an often difficult-to-access ecosystem that simply can’t scale to the millions of physicians graduating worldwide into practice.

Inaccessible. Cost prohibitive. Unscalable. That’s the surgical simulation of our time. But in 2015, a team of renowned game designers, Emmy-award winning engineers, and LucasFilm-trained artists set out to unleash the latest video game technologies and methodologies into medicine unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. Level EX was created to close the gap between surgical training and entertainment. Building apps like Airway EX that bring ultra-realistic virtual surgery to the iPhone/iPad/Android device you already own.

Simulators I built on videogame technologies in the past have quietly rallied audiences of hundreds of thousands of users while demonstrating marked improved physician performance in efficacy studies. All of the sudden, there’s this possibility. What if, through advanced simulation using video game technology, we can substantially shift how physicians are able to approach new devices and minimally-invasive techniques?

By unleashing the technologies and design methodologies from the video games industry, game designers are radically reducing risk while changing the way surgeons worldwide stay up-to-speed with the latest progress in their field. Any place, any time, any physician.