Report: VR Enabling Better Health

by Todd Maddox

Adopting immersive technologies can improve patient outcomes and save costs for healthcare providers.

Every day thousands of patients are tasked with making critical decisions about their healthcare. Often the issues are complex and can seem overwhelming, especially for people already under stress with health worries. The intensity of these decisions is increased exponentially when a life-threatening illness is involved, and to make matters worse, time is often of the essence. It is no exaggeration to say that making such decisions quickly and accurately can be a matter of life or death, so stakes are high.

In this report, I examine healthcare decision-making in patients. This is a critical issue that affects overall healthcare costs and patients’ quality of life. I ask whether current approaches to healthcare patient education lead to fast and accurate decisions and whether immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), might improve matters, ultimately lowering costs and increasing patient satisfaction.

Traditional approaches to patient education are often ineffective because they target only one learning system in the…