Thomas M Krummel,
MD Emile Holman Professor
and Chair, Department of Surgery Stanford University
“Surgical Simulation: To Err is
human” In the United States,
medical care consumes approximately $1.2 trillion annually (14% of the
gross domestic product) and involves 250,000 physicians, almost 1 million
nurses, and countless other providers. While the Information Age has
changed virtually every other facet of our life, the education of these
healthcare professionals, both present and future, is largely mired in the
100-year-old apprenticeship model best exemplified by the phase "see one,
do one, teach one." Continuing medical education is even less advanced.
While the half-life of medical information is less than 5 years, the
average physician practices 30 years and the average nurse 40 years.
Moreover, as medical care has become increasingly complex, medical error
has become a substantial problem. The current convulsive climate in
academic health centers provides an opportunity to rethink the way medical
education is delivered across a continuum of professional lifetimes. If
this is well executed, it will truly make medical education better, safer,
and cheaper, and provide real benefits to patient care, with instantaneous
access to learning modules. At the Center for Advanced Technology in
Surgery at Stanford we envision this future: within the next 10 years we
will select, train, credential, remediate, and recredential physicians and
surgeons using simulation, virtual reality, and Web-based electronic
learning. Future physicians will be able to rehearse an operation on a
projectable palpable hologram derived from patient-specific data, and
deliver the data set of that operation with robotic assistance the next
day. |