UNC-Chapel Hill has applied for a patent for a modular staged simulator and a process of simulating medical trauma for training and certification purposes.
UNC-Chapel Hill and Richard Feins, Andrew Grubbs, Alexander Grubbs and Matthew Dedmon filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Nov. 10.
This patent relates to training exercises ex vivo, or outside of the body, as compared to traditional forms of training using intact cadavers. It also includes operating surgery in vivo, or inside animal subjects, and supervised apprenticeship performing surgery on humans with trauma or diseases under a medical practitioner.
Traditionally all surgical training involves an apprenticeship model in a hospital setting where residents performed surgery under experienced surgeons. The patent states that the training was driven by chance and the situations that people came into the hospital with and residents were not getting as many surgery experiences.
There was also a problem in that the number of hours residents are available for surgery has decreased. The patent said that this caused the failure rate for surgery board certification exams to be about 26 percent, and for specialized surgery board certifications the failure rate can be as high as 33 percent.
The patent wants to help reduce the failure rate with its new training process. It also mentions that virtual reality training has helped teach medical providers interviewing or diagnostic skills. These can be useful for demonstrating how to proceed in the event of a trauma and shows the steps to take for different surgeries but does not allow the surgeon to practice hands-on.
This patent will give a surgeon the opportunity to work with a staged fake patient undergoing surgery with different ways to practice more hands-on in staged reality models.
This patent is related to the 2010 “Modular Staged Reality Simulator” patent application filed by UNC-Chapel Hill and the same inventors as above.
