Software to train soft skills

Co-founder of VIRTUAI Maybelline Ooi shares how virtual healthcare simulations are key to advancing training, especially in soft skills.

What should a doctor do if a patient and his family disagree on his care? How should a nurse react when receiving contradictory instructions? These are some scenarios that healthcare students and professionals could learn to handle through a desktop virtual reality programme created by National University of Singapore (NUS) healthcare spin-off VIRTUAI. The programme uses customisable single player and multiplayer scenarios to teach soft skills such as critical thinking, bedside manners and how to communicate effectively with others in multidisciplinary teams.

VIRTUAI co-founder and chief executive Maybelline Ooi, an alumna of the NUS Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies (NUS Nursing) and former nurse, noted that while many healthcare start-ups focus on technical skills, soft ones are equally important in delivering quality patient care. “With our programme, aspiring and practicing healthcare professionals can experience a wide variety of cases and circumstances, including medical errors and ethical dilemmas that they may not come across in real-life clinical settings.”

In single-player simulations, trainees could be tested on their ability to prioritise when faced with competing urgent demands, and their responses to medical errors. They could also be tasked with deducing the cause of a patient’s illness based on his medical history, signs and symptoms and laboratory results.

By removing geographical and resource constraints, the programme also enables students and professionals from local and foreign institutions to come together easily for multidisciplinary and team-based training.

This would hone their interpersonal skills, especially when collaborating with others on patient care.

Led by principal investigator and pedagogy advisor Associate Professor Liaw Sok Ying, an NUS Nursing director of undergraduate education, the programme has been used to train nursing and medical students at NUS Nursing and the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine since 2017.

It was initially done in small-scale pilots before integration into their interprofessional core curriculum training last year. The programme will also be commercially available next year.

Ms Ooi added that the software has novel features that make it invaluable as a teaching tool. It can automatically generate virtual scenarios and environments from uploaded documents, such as case scenarios commonly used in teaching, by deploying key word recognition and word association.

Its performance analytics and data visualisation also tracks and highlights learners’ strengths and weaknesses over time, with a recommendation engine suggesting scenarios to help them improve and advance through difficulty levels at their own pace.

Schools can also use students’ performance data to make more informed decisions about curriculums and budget allocations, including to address recurring issues across learners and cohorts.

After VIRTUAI launches its programme, it will develop a premium product that covers technical skills by using extended reality headsets. The equipment will unlock virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality scenarios.

“By using the premium product with real-life mannequins, trainees could be immersed in a virtual operating room and practice their surgical skills on a mannequin with wounds superimposed on it,” explained Ms Ooi.

VIRTUAI also plans to eventually build a platform marketplace where healthcare institutions can sell their customised virtual simulation modules, sharing their expertise and empowering students and professionals to learn from the best.

Ms Ooi envisioned: “We can bridge the disparity in global healthcare training standards, and use this opportunity to bring Singapore’s top-notch healthcare trainings to the rest of the world.”

VIRTUAI founders have participated in multiple entrepreneurship programmes in NUS. This includes the NUS Overseas Colleges, to embark on start-up internships in entrepreneurial hotspots around the world, and the NUS GRIP, which nurtures deep tech entrepreneurial talent to transform research into startups.

This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of RIE News.

We would like to acknowledge NUS Information Technology for contributing to the development of the software.