J. Harvey Magee(1) and Dr. Gerald Moses (2)

(1) SHERIKON, Inc., an Anteon Company, under contract to the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), HQ US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (MRMC), Ft. Detrick, Maryland

(2) Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), HQ US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (MRMC), Ft. Detrick, Maryland

“Military Medical Modeling and Simulation in the 21^st Century”

Military medicine struggles with critical issues.  How do we train medical personnel in peace to deliver medical care in war?  In 1998, the General Accounting Office reported, “military medical personnel have almost no chance during peacetime to practice battlefield trauma care skills. As a result, physicians both within and outside the Department of Defense (DOD) believe that military medical personnel are not prepared to provide trauma care to the severely injured soldiers in wartime…” 

Some of today’s training methods are disappearing, the challenges of training are more difficult, and impediments to training, e.g., restricted animal use, costs of live mass casualty exercises, are increasing.  To address these challenges, four categories of medical simulation are emerging:  PC-based multimedia, digital mannequins, virtual workbenches, Total Immersion Virtual Reality.  Success requires a strategic plan, single-agency integration, excellent scientific research in “enabling technologies”, sound business practices, and integrated efforts among domain experts in their own fields, e.g., physicians, nurses and “combat medics”, working side by side with engineers, computer scientists, designers, experts in education and training, human factors engineers, and managers, to ensure development of effective training devices that will enhance our limited hands-on training opportunities and revolutionize how we train in peace…to deliver medicine in war.