Whenever you see a doctor, you expect to consult an expert. Why else would you trust that person to tell you how to take care of your body? And if you’re dealing with a serious condition or require surgery, the stakes can be even higher: You need to ensure that the person wielding the scalpel is a competent, confident, highly trained professional.
That’s where help from the Johnson & Johnson Institute can come in.
As a company, Johnson & Johnson is committed to helping ensure that patients get excellent care, and the Johnson & Johnson Institute is one key way it’s delivering on that commitment by providing professional education to healthcare providers worldwide so they’re up to speed on the latest techniques and procedures for the safe and effective use of its products.
And if you’re imagining old-school lecture halls and thick textbooks, think again. While many doctors do travel to Institute sites, technological advances are also making it possible for medical training to reach physicians right where they work and live—cutting-edge technology like virtual reality and online surgical skills improvement training.
As the Johnson & Johnson Institute in Raynham, Massachusetts, one of five locations around the world now featuring virtual reality training, celebrates its relaunch this fall, we explore how the company is paving the way for exceptional patient care across the globe—high-tech style.
1.
Near-Real-Time Feedback on Surgical Skills Across the U.S.
When you’re performing surgery, seconds count, as does precision.
Now, thanks to a personalized performance management platform called C-SATS, surgeons who specialize in laparoscopic, robotic and open surgery can quickly get detailed feedback about their technical skills soon after performing a procedure while it’s still fresh in their mind.
Since C-SATS first launched in 2014, it has been used in hundreds of operating rooms in hospitals across the country, says Derek Streat, Vice President of Performance Improvement at the Johnson & Johnson Institute and C-SATS CEO and co-founder.
How it works: A hardware device is placed in operating rooms to capture videos recorded during robotic and laparoscopic surgeries.
The recording is then uploaded to a HIPAA-compliant, secure cloud platform, and within hours, expert reviewers receive the file and start analyzing it. The reviewers then send back qualitative and quantitative feedback, which is matched with improvement recommendations by proprietary algorithms.
“It’s somewhat similar to a peer review process that might take place inside a hospital, but that process can take weeks or months [to complete]. We’ve reduced it down to hours and days,” Streat explains. “As surgeons go about their day, and as they’re working, they have the opportunity to review feedback with the goal of improving the quality of their work.”
The impact: Operations done by surgeons who’ve used C-SATS have been associated with better patient outcomes. For example, there’s a 56% decreased likelihood of major bleeding when you compare a surgeon’s pre-C-SATS outcomes to results after he or she has had more than 10 C-SATS reviews, according to hospital data.
Plus, minimally invasive surgeries are 74% more likely to go according to plan—that is, not become open surgeries—when the doctors performing them have used C-SATS.
2.
A Training Center on Wheels in India
With a population of over 1.3 billion—and growing—it’s challenging for the supply of doctors to keep up with demand for medical care in India. There are only six physicians and 13 nurses for every 10,000 people in the country.
Getting physicians to take time away from their jam-packed schedules to attend training seminars can be difficult, which is what makes the Johnson & Johnson Institute on Wheels so impactful—it can travel right to the doorstep of medical schools and teaching hospitals.
How it works: The mobile training center is a bus outfitted with surgical tools and training stations designed to offer surgeons, those training to be surgeons and other medical professionals hands-on experience in such areas as pediatric and cardiothoracic procedures, just to name a couple.
The impact: The Institute on Wheels hit the road in March, with plans to make stops throughout the country.
The goal is to visit 400 towns during the next five years, which should translate into providing medical training to 25,000 surgeons across India.
3.
Worldwide Virtual Reality Training for Orthopedic Surgeons and Nurses
Wouldn’t it be great if surgeons could perform the same procedure over and over—gaining confidence and improving their skills—without having to practice on patients?
Enter virtual reality (VR), which is becoming a new and promising option for orthopedic surgeons, nurses and residents.
How it works: Healthcare providers put on a VR headset and use accompanying handheld devices to virtually go through the procedural steps and physical motions of performing hip or knee replacement surgery.
All of the instruments and implants featured in the VR training simulate a real-world experience in the operating room, including anatomical accuracy. Plus, the technology evaluates surgeons using data capture and analytics to help improve their skills.
“In the last two to three years, motion controllers and motion tracking has progressed so much that virtual reality has advanced to become a real surgical training tool,” says Kartik Logishetty, a joints surgeon at Imperial College in London who is collaborating with the Institute.
The Johnson & Johnson Institute VR training program launched at the company’s facility in Germany in 2017, and has since expanded globally to Johnson & Johnson Institutes in the U.S., Brazil, China and Japan.
“For younger surgeons, VR gives them the confidence they need, because you can do the procedure as often as you want until you feel comfortable. That’s a big step forward,” says David Badri, Virtual Reality Lead, WW Professional Education, Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices.
The impact: The Johnson & Johnson Institute has more than 50 sets of VR equipment worldwide, and several hundred surgeons have had a chance to try it. More than 90% of those who tested it said that they would use it again and recommend it to others.
4.
Digital Training Prep in Brazil
For surgeons in Brazil, lack of standardization tends to be a challenge: Doctors don’t always use the same terminology, or perform procedures using the same protocol. This makes providing higher-level medical education difficult, because physicians aren’t speaking the same medical language.
So the Johnson & Johnson Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, came up with a solution: VideoAtlas, a digital training manual that a physician can download as an iBook or as an app through an Apple or Android device.
How it works: VideoAtlas is an original digital method of teaching based on standardization of the operative technique. It’s essentially a digital textbook—complete with detailed pictures and instructions—that physicians can work through at their own pace.
“We had to come up with a way to standardize everything for surgeons before offering them advanced training at our Institute,” explains Fernanda Abi Jaudi, Latin America Education Leader, Johnson & Johnson, Brazil. “It’s now like a recipe: Each procedure has a set name, and incision sites get standardized names.”
Once someone has been trained with VideoAtlas, he or she is then eligible for hands-on training at the Johnson & Johnson Institute.
The impact: VideoAtlas has reached thousands of surgeons. The iBook version has been downloaded nearly 18,000 times, and the smartphone app, introduced in 2017, already has more than 6,000 downloads.
5.
Continuing Medical Education Meets Social Media in China
When the Johnson & Johnson Institute learned that healthcare providers in China were spending an average of 29.2 hours a week online, yet only 5% of them were attending annual continuing medical education programs, it became clear that digitizing training programs could be a smart solution to offer the country’s busy medical professionals.
And that’s how JClass—a series of web-based training courses that physicians can participate in just by logging into their favorite social media site—came to be.
JClass has already reached more than 800,000 healthcare providers throughout the country.
How it works: JClass takes place at prescheduled times and streams via WeChat, China’s popular social media site. “It’s like Facebook, plus Twitter,” says Sijia Shen, Senior Professional Education Manager, Johnson & Johnson China.
Anyone with a computer or a WeChat account can tune in and type questions. And if an interested surgeon misses the live show, he or she can get it on demand via the Institute website.
The impact: JClass has already reached more than 800,000 healthcare providers throughout the country. The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive: Over 2,000 physicians surveyed said they learned something substantial from JClass.
