The Digital Innovation, Simulation, and Collaboration using Virtual Environment Realities (DISCOVER) for Pediatric Diagnostic Excellence
The DISCOVER program encompasses the use of a novel digital twin environment we have developed here at Cincinnati Children's which exactly replicates the PICU clinical environment. A digital twin is a virtual model that replicates a physical system. They are being increasingly used for testing and planning across industries, including healthcare, with use cases such as disease risk modeling and patient flow analysis. Our team has developed and implemented a digital twin, experienced through immersive virtual reality, of the critical care environment. It features virtual patients with realistic clinical exams, responsive vital signs, and interactive equipment. We have also developed, in collaboration with CINCI Lab, digital twin electronic health records to pair with this environment.
This environment was first developed to support onboarding for over 1300 staff to our ICUs prior to their opening in 2021. Since that time we've greatly expanded the platforms ability to create custom clinical scenarios that replicate real-life clinical encounters and allow teams of clinicians to work together at the bedside through use of immersive virtual reality headsets.
Our team is actively seeking collaborators for leveraging this novel platform to support training, assessment, systems safety engineering, product and algorithm design and testing, and human factors analyses. We plan to expand the digital twin environment to additional clinical contexts to expand the scope of our work aimed at preventing and managing critical illness.
DISCOVER for Pediatric Diagnostic Excellence
Our team is currently leading an AHRQ funded R18 supporting a patient safety learning laboratory to explore clinical team workflow during patient decompensation events and how to optimize clinical decision support (CDS) tools to enhance clinician diagnostic excellence. We have partnered with the Live Well Collaborative, a nonprofit founded by the University of Cincinnati and Procter & Gamble in 2007, that applies design thinking to develop user-centered solutions. Our collaboration has led to unique visualizations of PICU workflows, identified challenges and successes, and informed design opportunities for CDS tools.
Using a systems engineering approach, our transdisciplinary team is redesigning clinical decision support (CDS) tools for pediatric critical care, focusing on diagnosis-intensive events. The project involves developing and testing design-informed CDS tools in an immersive virtual reality simulation to evaluate their impact on diagnostic accuracy and timeliness. Ultimately, the grant seeks to establish best practices for implementing these tools in the critical care environment to improve diagnostic excellence. Key outcomes include assessing the appropriateness and acceptability of the tools, their impact on diagnostic accuracy, and the development of a proactive implementation plan for their integration into clinical practice.
