Johnson & Johnson aims to make VR training available to every surgeon 

The Johnson & Johnson Institute said that training surgeons using Oculus virtual reality headsets has yielded such impressive results that it now wants to bring VR to doctors-in-training worldwide. 

Sandra Humbles, the vice president of global education solutions at the Johnson & Johnson Institute, talked about the effective results of VR training during the keynote this week at the Oculus Connect 6 event in California.

She said that virtual reality gives surgeons the capability to practice procedures. And an independent study by the Imperial College London showed that 83% of surgeons who trained with VR could then go into the lab environment with minimal guidance.

Amazingly, the results for the test group of surgeons who trained using traditional methods were zero.

The Johnson & Johnson Institute said that training surgeons using Oculus virtual reality headsets has yielded such impressive results that it now wants to bring VR to doctors-in-training worldwide.
Sandra Humbles: vice president of global education solutions at the Johnson & Johnson Institute

J&J has been working alongside virtual reality surgical training startup Osso VR to develop VR experiences for medical training. 

Following the overwhelmingly positive feedback from its research, The Johnson & Johnson Institute now plans to make VR training available worldwide: “we want to make VR training available to every surgeon in the world,” Humbles said.

More promising research for VR medical training

Another recent validation study conducted by the David Geffen School of Medicine indicates that virtual reality could provide significant benefits to surgical training.

The study, which was financed by Osso VR, indicates that participants who used the company’s training methods improved their overall surgical performance by 230%.

VR training medical healthcare surgery
virtual reality surgical training startup Osso VR

In the UCLA study, 20 participants were divided between a traditionally trained group and a group that underwent VR training to a specified level of proficiency. Each participant then performed a tibial intramedullary nailing on a sawbones simulation, graded by an observer who did not know which participant had been in which group.

Students who’d had the VR training completed the procedure 2% faster and completed more steps correctly according to the procedure-specific checklist that participants were scored against.