ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Virtual Reality is overthrowing the status quo in surgical training, which falls short in many ways— it’s expensive, inefficient, and scattershot, and can’t keep up with some of today’s complex procedures, and this has implications for medtech companies introducing innovative devices and new techniques.
Surgical skill correlates with outcomes, an obvious and well documented fact. But the conventional processes by which surgeons have learned those skills are scattershot and unable to keep up with the complexity of today’s technology-enabled procedures. “See one, do one, teach one,” is an old adage in the field, but if that were ever the case, it’s certainly not true when it comes to some of today’s interventions requiring minimally invasive access, surgical navigation, or robotics, which might have learning curves of 50-100 cases.
