Over the past week I have been looking at Second Life (www.secondlife.com) with my avatar “devrjd windstorm”. This is my first experience with Second Life (SL) and my goal was to determine how the software could affect patient-doctor relationships; specifically in patient-doctor interactions. I feel that I met this goal and came to the conclusion that there are some good, bad and questionable aspects of SL and interactions.
Good: General Doctor-Patient Interactions
It makes sense to me that the most obvious uses of Second Life for doctor – patient interactions is when interactions are remote. This would be useful in cases where the patients are not able to physically see the doctor due to distance, a physical limitation, or a mental health issue. If the doctor had a SL “office” where the patient could go for a consultation, then this would provide a functional use of telemedicine. The usefulness of this could be greatly expanded if SL would ensure a secure transmission of data and perhaps work as a “data portal” of PHR, EHR, and EMR data. By “data portal” I was thinking that SL would not actually store any patient / doctor data but allow the visibility of this data to be accessed through the SL interface. For example, a patient who is recovering from knee surgery is scheduled for the 1st post follow up visit (meaning that they are at home, but not very mobile). The day before the scheduled visit, the patient has her husband take multiple pictures of her knee; she then uploads these to her PHR. The day of her visit she logs into SL and teleports to her doctor’s office. The doctor has permission to sync the images of her knee with the EMR and can thus see how the knee is doing and ask any needed questions, adjust medications and so on. The patient didn’t have to leave her house, and probably received a very high level of care from her physician.
Bad: Is this better than other forms of telemedicine?
In my scenario above I have what I consider an example of a basic potential use case of telemedicine. In trying to apply the above to SL, I kept asking myself if this was better than using some other forms of software, such as video conferencing, to achieve the same result. I think Second Life may provide a more physical feel of seeing a doctor, but I just can’t help the feeling that in use of telemedicine there will be more adoption of video than virtual reality. This is especially true in the fact that use of video/ video conferencing is being built more and more into the devices we use, such as laptop, netbooks and smart phones (iPads, not yet, but someday soon), and that the speed and reliability of these technologies seems to be reaching new levels where we can depend on them .
By the way, where I do feel very confident that SL is a huge benefit to medicine is in training, education, and medical response simulation. Maybe even in general hospital administration, such as creating simulations for bed space – and seeing if there are ways to improve usage and care.
Questionable: Security
I tried to find some clear information on Second Life’s security model, and specifically what problems there might be with protected health information. I say tried, because SL does not make it very easy to figure out how their data is stored and if there is any way to allow for a secure level of data transmission in the case of a patient – doctor interaction (and access to PHR, EMR, EHR data). If SL is not able or unwilling to provide / ensure an extremely high level of data security than I do not see how it could be used in a meaningful way for patient doctors to interact. I would be interested to learn more about this – if anyone has info on this, please comment and let me know.
Notes:
I should point out that had a hard time exploring health “places” as using the built in search engine for some of the applicable words did not return results as I would have expected. This seems to be consistent with the survey “A Survey of Health-Related Activities on Second Life” (Leslie Beard, BDes; Kumanan Wilson, MD, MSc; Dante Morra, MD, MBA; Jennifer Keelan, PhD - http://www.jmir.org/2009/2/e17/ ); that said, I did some Google searching and found:
· A “place” call HealthInfo Island (much which is under construction)
· “3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare” (Vanessa G. González, Macquarie University, Australia) http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/664/504 .
In case you were wondering about my avatar name, no real meaning, just an abbreviation for developer [dev] my initials [rjd] and a random last name J
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