GigXR and Morlen Health, a Subsidiary of Northwest Permanente, P.C., Announce Availability of Holographic Basic Life Support Training

Partners bring Basic Life Support (BLS) training to TIME-award winning HoloScenarios application

GigXR, Inc., a global provider of holographic healthcare training, releases a pivotal new Basic Life Support module for its award-winning HoloScenarios mixed reality application. Created in partnership with Morlen Health, a subsidiary of Northwest Permanente, P.C., the hyper-immersive holographic training module delivers lifelike realism to enhance learning and retention of critical skills required to provide Basic Life Support. 

The new module – HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support – uses mixed reality to accurately simulate the urgency of providing immediate care to a patient requiring Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) or use of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Learners can 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. 

Delivered by the Gig Immersive Learning Platform, the module provides the option for instructors to remotely train first responders, healthcare providers, medical and nursing students, public safety professionals, and community members. Learners can join lessons from the same or disparate physical locations – whether in simulation lab, classroom or at-home study space – while still seeing the same hologram. 

“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. 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,” said Patricia Ramos, MD, MCRP, Medical Director, Center for Innovative Medical Simulation and Senior Emergency Physician at Kaiser Permanente Northwest. “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.”

The module has two scenarios – each of which  allows instructors to choose varying degrees of difficulty to meet individual training requirements or environments. Instructors can also use complementary applications delivered by the platform for deeper exploration of the anatomy and physiology behind the conditions that drive the need for BLS or to reinforce anatomical reasons for actions within BLS. For example, instructors can use HoloHuman, co-created with 3D4Medical by Elsevier, 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.

“The realism of the holographic patient draws a deeper and more emotional connection for learners, and replicates a sense of urgency and patient distress to prompt timely intervention in a way that a manikin, whether state-of-the-art or a simple task trainer, cannot match,” added Ramos. “By also accurately mimicking the action steps of providing Basic Life Support – from the manual skills of using CPR techniques and an AED to the communication required among the healthcare team – the software catalyzes empathy and strong communication skills. Our belief is that it will drive knowledge retention so the skills can be used as needed for a potentially life saving situation.”

“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. “Traditional CPR training and simulation labs often require significant resources both at the infrastructure and faculty level – hours required to set up, run and clean up after manikin simulation. GigXR has created the platform to reach more learners – who now have greater access to our incredible network of medical experts and educators – and allow other institutions to replicate the high quality of training we are able to provide.” 

HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support is the newest addition to the Gig Immersive Learning Platform’s rapidly expanding catalog of mixed reality applications. Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Neurology scenarios are currently in development with GigXR partners Morlen Health and the University of Michigan, and other blue chip healthcare institutions are currently poised to continue expanding applications. HoloScenarios: Respiratory, GigXR’s most recent module co-created with the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals / NHS Trust, was awarded TIME’s 2022 Best Inventions. All of GigXR’s existing and future modules are designed to work together to reinforce learning objectives, allowing instructors to  leverage multiple applications in a single lesson for in-depth training.

“We are honored to partner with Morlen Health to expand training content within our HoloScenarios application and to use immersive technology to democratize levels of realism that can supplement – and sometimes replace – traditional simulation methods,” said Jared Mermey, CEO, GigXR. “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.”

GigXR has been scaling access to mixed reality training since its 2019 debut. Today, customers across four continents–including nursing and medical schools, healthcare systems, teaching hospitals, government agencies and defense agencies–use the Gig Immersive learning Platform to seamlessly scale and centralize their adoption of immersive learning.

“In 2023, mixed reality is poised to come into the mainstream as never before,” said David King Lassman, Founder at GigXR. “With new initiatives, announced seemingly every other week, there is greater awareness for this cutting edge yet intuitive technology that’s pushing holographic content development and software innovation forward. 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 scale this technology to learners globally.” 

HoloScenarios: Basic Life Support is available for purchase starting today. For more information, visit gigxr.com.