December 16, 2019 – VR data analytics company, Virtualitics, announced recently that the System Optimization team at Fraser Health has been using the Virtualitics Immersive Platform whilst working to find innovative ways to translate data, including data gamification, to improve efficiency and results.
Like many organizations, British Columbia-based health authority, Fraser Health, delivers data primarily via PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. However, according to the organization, there is little interaction between data analysts and clinical partners on how reports are prepared, what the data means, or what meaningful actions healthcare leaders can take as a result.
According to Fraser Health, for the future health of its system, data needs to be presented in a more meaningful way to simplify decision-making. The System Optimization team recently took on a challenge to gamify health care data using virtual reality. They used the Virtualitics Immersive Platform to create an environment where clinicians can feel like they are stepping into their data, experiencing it in real time as moveable graphics simply by putting on a VR headset at their desk.
“Let’s gamify our relationship with data,” said Hardeep Chaggar, Executive Director of System Optimization at Fraser Health. “I want to walk into my data lake, play with my data cubes, and see what is there.”
Virtualitics and Fraser Health both highlighted that visualizing healthcare data with VR has several advantages. Firstly, in a virtual setting, users are able to play with data to reveal anomalies or trends. Furthermore, multiple people from the same project can log into a VR environment together to talk about and explore the data in real time. Users can also view multiple metrics at once to help surface new patterns and insights. Virtual reality also reduces unnecessary travel time and expense for the healthcare provider – Instead of one analyst paired with one site, VR collaboration allows an analyst at a head office to work with multiple clinicians in the field.
The Virtualitics Immersive Platform enables healthcare users to manipulate and interact with multidimensional data to support critical business insights. This helps users to maximize data engineering and science resources, and improves the way analysts are able to connect with direct care staff.
Chaggar recently presented a prototype of this vision at the Agiloft Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, where it won a best innovation award, something which Virtualitics believes is a testament to the transformative impact VR technology and Virtualitics can bring to the health care system.
Image/video credit: Fraser Health Authority
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.