Simulation Fields Seek Technology Synergies.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

OMAHA, Neb. -- Every June as residents fresh out of medical school join hospitals, the death rate for patients rises.

In medical circles, the well-documented trend is called "Black Wednesday" for the day these new and inexperienced physicians arrive, or sometimes "the killing season" for the weeks that follow.

The high death rate is chalked up to the new doctors' inexperience. By the end of June, mortality rates at these institutions begin to fall again as the doctors learn from their mistakes.

"The problem is that obviously they are doing that at the expense of the patients. They are killing patients. That's how they are learning," said Dr. Robert Amyot, president of CAE Healthcare, a Quebec-based modeling and simulation company.

"This is unacceptable in health care and something we have to absolutely change," Amyot said at the National Modeling and Simulation Coalition's annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, co-sponsored by the National Training and Simulation Association.

NTSA and the coalition organize a yearly meeting around a theme in order to explore synergies between industries that use modeling and simulation. In 2017, it was held in Michigan to exchange ideas with the automotive sector. In 2018, the University of Nebraska's Medical Center hosted the event to look at where the worlds of military and medical simulation meet. The consensus is that the health care industry is far behind in using training and simulation to educate its personnel.

Rick Severinghaus, chair of the coalition's policy committee, said, "the deployment and application of modeling and simulation and visualization technologies is far more advanced in DoD because they have been working on it for a far longer period, forced by circumstances."

Yet the two industries have a lot to offer each other and intersect when it comes to patient care.

"When you think about hazards to [military] personnel, the simple example is injuries. We call them 'patients' in the civilian world. We call them 'wounded soldiers' in the military world, but some of the modeling and simulation technology can be used to treat, diagnose, train or otherwise improve the performance of medical training for personnel and doctors, either in the [operating room] or the battlefield," Severinghaus said.

There is a lot of technical research that applies to both health care and the military domains, but the two industries speak in different languages and think in terms of different priorities, he added.

The...