Meeting at workshops is essential for surgeons : discussions, networking, learning about advances, and sharing experiences or questions are among the many reasons the community needs to meet… These events are invaluable to your medical device business, and a privileged platform for being discovered by the best surgeons in their area of specialization, thanks to the key opinion leaders (KOLs) present. How can the workshop’s benefits to your medical device be prolonged?
Revinax immersive tutorials pick up where in-person training leaves off. They are designed to prevent weaknesses in learning that can gradually appear. This article tells you why.
Workshops: an imperative for surgeons
These in-person workshops are meeting and training events essential for healthcare professionals. It is also a chance for them to discover new medical devices. Thus, time with the KOL before and during the workshop is crucial.
The importance of the KOL during the workshop
KOLs are specialists in their fields, recognized and followed by their peers for their expertise. They introduce the workshop by making a presentation on their practice, the instruments and medical devices they use, the expected results, and the advantages of the product.
This presentation time is often followed by a live video or in-person presentation in the operating room: there, surgeons can see the KOL performing the surgery, which allows them to judge the effectiveness of the device directly and observe the surgical technique.
The advantage of using the medical device during a workshop
The advantage of workshops for surgeons is the ability to discover the medical device under the right conditions:
- A presentation by the KOL, who has sometimes even helped design it,
- A chance for participants to handle the device, sometimes with the possibility of imitating this work, using physical simulators, silicone models, or even cadavers (during a cadaver lab).
Performance of the procedure allows the surgeons present to start to get used to the device, to judge its effectiveness, and its direct use.
The problem is that time can pass between this first encounter with the device and the first actual surgery using the new medical device. Does the same apply to for loss of memorization of the procedure and the interest of our participants?
The drawback of “in-person only”
As indispensable as they are in terms of networking and improving practices, in-person workshops also have some drawbacks if not followed by other modes of learning.
1. Less time to use the medical device
During the workshop, time to handle and use the medical device is necessarily limited, due to the number of participants present.
Information loss after the workshop
At the moment, everything seems clear, but a few days or weeks later, memory fades. This is normal, but it also requires the company’s sales force to remind, make appointments, and regularly request clinical support to surgeons as reinforcement.
High cost
Hotel rooms, restaurants, booths, cocktails or buffets, the calender blocked out for one or more days for all of the participants: trade shows are a crucial training time for the medical community, but they also involve a heavy financial commitment.
To optimize the return on investment, the objective would be to maintain the level of mastery of the medical device after the workshop, or even, ideally, to improve it.
Workshops and the health crisis
The Covid crisis showed that unavoidable circumstances can make it impossible to organize in-person workshops. And yet, they are crucial to training. So, how can we compensate for the inability to hold live events?
Immersive tutorials: a way to optimize workshop learning
The principle of the immersive tutorial
A first-person immersive experience that can be used anytime, as often as necessary: that is what Revinax offers. Our immersive tutorials are among the most complete training tools. They include 3D video, augmented reality, and supplemental information and content. They have the big advantage of being available right on your phone, through our app.
The idea is to focus cameras on the KOL during use of the medical device under real-life conditions during surgery. Once the film is created, the very design of our video capture equipment gives the learner the experience of 360° immersion in the operating room, in the skin of the surgeon performing the operation. Bistoury or trocar in hand, you feel as though you’re there: this is a course unlike any you’ve ever seen. You are in the skin of your professor!
The pedagogic advantages of Revinax tutorials in high-fidelity, 3D, FPV* virtual reality
- Once the virtual reality headset is on, the brain integrates the movements made by the KOL as if they were the user’s own. Because of the mirror neurons activated by this immersive technology, the brain better retains what it experiences or thinks it is experiencing, shortening the learning curve enormously. This is a real innovation in this area.
- The use of our solution during a workshop, before practicing on a cadaver or simulator, for example, allows gestures to be assimilated more quickly, so that learners ask more precise questions. The objective is to improve the efficiency and quality of the training.
- The tutorial is kept on an online platform with secure access: this skills library allows all of the automated cognitive processing to be reactivated on demand and reinforces memorization.
Very simple logistics
After the tutorial is used during the trade show, it is then directly available on our Handbook app through your smartphone, with or without a cardboard. This training tool does away with the space and time constraints of in-person trainings. It’s available whenever you want.
The Covid crisis and resulting health restrictions show that this type of tool, which filled in during the pandemic but can, if needed, replace in-person meetings, is not only very simple logistically compared with organizing a workshop, but it can become absolutely necessary when unforeseen circumstances arise.
*FPV: First Person View.
