GigXR Partners with Northwest Permanente, P.C. Subsidiary Morlen Health to Deliver Scalable Mixed Reality Basic Life Support Training

Each year, the American Heart Association alone trains 16 million people in CPR and AED use around the world – community members, first responders and clinical and hospital-based healthcare professionals to name just a few. With that level of commitment to helping share these lifesaving skills, highlighted earlier this year with the successful resuscitation of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin on-field in Cincinnati, why do errors occur in as much as 40% of in-hospital cardiac arrests?

While traditional training methods, such as manikins and tutorial videos, can demonstrate the key manual skills required to perform CPR and use an AED, it can be challenging to convey the urgency, empathy and teamwork required when a patient suffers cardiac arrest and teams have to respond within minutes.

GigXR has partnered with Morlen Health, a subsidiary of Northwest Permanente, P.C., to launch HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support, the latest mixed reality module for the TIME award-winning HoloScenarios application. Hyper-realistic hologram patients enable learners to see and interact with both a hyper-realistic hologram patient experiencing cardiac arrest and the medical equipment, such as AED devices, enabling lifelike, safe-to-fail collaboration between participants and the patient in their real-world environments.

“Basic Life Support is vital knowledge for any medical professional. Retention is critical to perform the appropriate actions immediately should a real life situation require it, as is collaboration among medical and community team members,” explains Patricia Ramos, MD, MCRP, Medical Director, Center for Innovative Medical Simulation and Senior Emergency Physician at Kaiser Permanente Northwest. “Often, when we see a poor outcome, it wasn’t that people didn’t know what to do, but rather there was a lack of seamless leadership, communication and coordination.”

“Partnering with GigXR to create the HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support module enables us to teach the full range of needed ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills using a hyper-realistic patient, and, for the first time, merge multiple mixed reality applications within simulation and anatomy for deeper learning,” Ramos adds.

GigXR’s HoloHuman, co-created with 3D4Medical by Elsevier, is a mixed reality complementary application that instructors can use to show why AED pad placement is crucial if it’s necessary to shock the heart. Structurally accurate holograms and animations of the heart from Insight Heart by ANIMA RES detail the physical impacts of various heart diseases on the organ itself.

“Partnering with GigXR allows our medical group to deliver highly immersive holographic training on a global scale while making it easily accessible for instructors and learners,” said Micah Thorp, MD, DO, President of Morlen Health and Vice President of Business Strategy for Northwest Permanente.

HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support is delivered by the Gig Immersive Learning Platform, which enables remote learning. Learners have the option to join from the same place as the instructor or from another space on the same or a different campus, such as a simulation lab, classroom, even a quiet spot in a student lounge or from an at-home study space.

“With new initiatives, announced seemingly every other week, there is greater awareness for mixed reality that’s pushing holographic content development and software innovation forward,” said David King Lassman, Founder at GigXR. “GigXR has championed mixed reality as a training tool since its inception and it is our great pleasure that the experts at Morlen Health chose us to bring this technology to learners globally.”

“With the release of HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support, we’re scaling access to one of the most experienced, highly regarded experts in medical simulation. Integrating Dr. Ramos’ expertise of how to best prepare learners for one of the most urgent, demanding situations in healthcare provides an invaluable resource that will save lives,” added Jared Mermey, CEO, GigXR.