“OK Glass:..Teach me Medicine!”

Or it could be : “OK Glass: teach me how to save a life!”

Today, we made history again…with GoogleGlass.

When thinking about its potential in Healthcare, it is a bit overwhelming. When I imagine what medical education could be like, if along with the incredible technology available, we would be inventive enough to apply it to enable learning, the results could be really be amazing.

Our current ability to remotely connect and enhance “virtual presence”  and communication has never been paralleled in history; this fact along the possibility to access all of “human knowledge” (in the internet!), by commanding a device- or a pair of glasses…

The future (really, the present!) of Medical Education will be awesome.

I have addressed some of my thoughts and vision for its use in clinical medicine before, and obviously, until the Private Health Information (PHI) exchange can be fully safeguarded, the full potential of Glass in this area will not be achieved. I’m not worried at all, because I know that the industry will soon provide HIPAA compliant applications ( soon, “there will be an App for that”!).

This morning, I had members our elite medical transport team, the LifeFlight of Maine (LoM) crew here in the office (www.Lifeflightmaine.org), along with their “top-of-the-line”, high-tech medical simulator mannequin, ready to show the potential of GoogleGlass in Medical Education. We set up a treatment room and then created a computerized clinical scenario. The mannequin “patient” was wirelessly connected to a laptop, where any set of clinical variables could be created.

We worked in three basic forms; first, a critical care LoM RN, emergently treating a patient and requesting advice from a remote GoogleGlass Surgeon. The second scenario involved the G-Glass Surgeon, remotely teaching a procedure to a group of students (PA’s, medical students and EMS students); here, the instructor is hands-free, concentrating on the actual procedure and the different steps to make it easy for the students to learn. The third one was a clinical situation where a request for advice was placed to a remote GoogleGlass cardiologist, my good friend and colleague, glass Explorer pioneer Dr. Christian Assad (@Christianassad), whom was able to give his expertise to the provider in need, from a remote location, wearing GoogleGlass in a Hang-out. Unfortunately, When Dr. Assad gives his advice to the me through GoogleGlass, you are not able to appreciate that on the video, since the audio comes to the GoogleGlass user by the way of bone conductivity.

The experience was very intuitive. The potential to improve the interface between the human user and the device, connecting to the internet and enabling synchronous audio-video communication is what strikes me most about GoogleGlass. Remote mentoring of students and providers with less experience, could be radically improved upon with this technology.

As I said and wrote before, the possibilities are endless and only limited by our imagination and creativity.

Enjoy the videos. Pass them along and please contact me with any questions, advice or needs.

My Best.

@ZGJR.