Why the University of Washington Wants Its Surgeons to Play Videogames

Randall Munroe / xkcd.com

In 1999, an Institute of Medicine study found that as many as 98,000 people die every year as the result of medical error in the U.S., incurring some $17 billion to $29 billion in hospital expenses. In 2009, the Safe Patient Project concluded that the situation may have gotten even worse in the decade that followed.

That's a tragedy, which Dr. Andy Wright - a surgeon and one of the core faculty members at the Institute for Simulation and Interprofessional Studies (ISIS), a health-care education program based at the University of Washington - thinks can be helped by playing videogames.

Wright isn't advocating for surgeons' entertainment, although he personally identifies as a gamer.

"Being a videogamer doesn't get a lot of respect in a lot of mainstream professions," he said at the gaming conference PAX last month. "But, it has been instrumental to me in becoming a surgeon."

Wright's specialty is laparoscopy, meaning that his surgeries require very small incisions, some less than a centimeter long, which may be more easily monitored from a TV screen than by looking directly at the surgical site. His panel at PAX, "Videogames in Medicine," argued that the skills developed by games, such as hand-eye coordination and deliberate practice and teamwork, are also conducive to success in the operating room.

"Running a World of Warcraft guild doing raids is not terribly bad preparation for working in a hospital," Wright said in the panel discussion, noting that between two-thirds and three-quarters of those medical-error deaths were the result of miscommunication. As an example of what not to do, he played this infamous clip of the World of Warcraft guild Pals For Life, seemingly falling apart:

On a more down-to-earth level, Wright discussed how virtual training "games" like the Surgical Science product LapSim can help surgeon trainees. Although every patient is different, simulating surgeries allows students the chance to fail and get feedback without endangering anyone's life. Plus, simulators can easily throw those students into experiences that they might only see once in their entire careers, in order to prepare them for unlikely circumstances.

There's some data to back this up. In a study conducted in 2002, surgical residents trained in a virtual-reality simulation of gallbladder dissection were six times less likely to make an error in the real world than a control group that only received standard training.

However, a review of academic literature on virtual-reality training published in 2010 raised two caveats: VR makes the biggest difference with simpler skills being learned by less-practiced surgeons, and manual surgical technique is just one of the competencies that it takes to become a good surgeon, with good clinical outcomes strongly influenced by interpersonal communication skills and good judgment.

So, can normal videogames - the ones not intended for medical training - help with those non-manual skills?

"Absolutely," Wright told AllThingsD via email. "This is an area where I haven't seen any research on the application of videogames in that context, but the skills are the same," he said. "We teach judgment, team management, communication skills, conflict resolution, and error disclosure in the sim lab. You could easily see training those in a virtual environment or through gaming."

Watsi Receives $1.2M in Funding to Push Forward the Nonprofit Tech Startup

Silicon Valley's tech scene is often accused of being self-absorbed and unjustifiably confident that its ideas are good for the greater world. See: George Packer's takedown of tech's involvement in politics in the New Yorker. "The imperative to change the world has recently led some Silicon Valley leaders to imagine that the values and concepts behind their success can be uploaded to the public sphere," he wrote.

Team Watsi, with Chase Adam at right

What about nonprofit work for the greater good? The tech industry doesn't have the strongest showing there, either. Though tech-savvy nonprofits like Kiva and Charity Water seem to be doing well, they remain on the periphery of the technology scene.

So it was interesting to see Watsi, a site that helps crowdfund medical treatments, steal the show at the last Y Combinator Demo Day, the high-status startup science fair at the end of the three-month accelerator program that has huge pull among investors.

During each break at Demo Day in March, the standard question to ask in the coffee line is, "Which did you like best today?" And this time, the answer I invariably got was "Watsi."

While often the most-hyped YC startups raise $4 million seed rounds, Watsi obviously wasn't going that route. It's a nonprofit; it has no equity to sell.

But Watsi is announcing today that it has indeed raised a round: $1.2 million from Tencent, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla and other investors.

"There's no expectation of return, but we want investors who hold us accountable," said Watsi co-founder Chase Adam in an interview this week.

Watsi is a "100 percent" nonprofit, in the model of Donors Choose. All the money that people commit online for medical treatments is received directly by the recipients. Watsi pays for its own administrative, staffing and other fees with the funding it just received.

Other than the fact that it doesn't want to make money, Watsi looks just like any other tech startup. It has a young team of six in San Francisco. It's based around crowdfunding, like so many other new companies in tech. Patients' personal stories are posted online, and donors add incremental funding toward their goals.

The company now has 16 partners, which include networks of hospitals around the world. It has funded 500 total patients in 16 countries in 11 months of operation.

$1.2 million is enough to keep that team going for the next 18 months, and to aim to triple that number in the next year, Adam said.

The funding also allows Adam and his team to not think about raising money for the next year and a half, unlike the traditional nonprofit model of having a division of the organization with their hand out at all times, he noted.

While Watsi is still the only (on-purpose) nonprofit that Y Combinator has ever accepted, Adam said he's hopeful that it's on the cusp of a larger movement.

"There's a lot of young money in Silicon Valley," he said. "As those people start to get older, they will start to get more philanthropic. But they'll want to support nonprofits that operate like businesses they understand. And I think that could have a massive impact, on a global scale."

Crowdfunding Site Medifund Wants To Help Students Become Doctors

Medifund is a crowdfunding Web site that wants to increase the number of doctors in countries with a critical shortage by helping students afford medical tuition. So far, the site, which is based in the Philippines and launched last month at Startup Weekend Cebu, has successfully completed the campaign of second-year medical student Kristine Bless, who raised PHP 25,000 (about $577 USD).

Founder Jossy Onwude, who is currently a student at Southwestern University's Mham College of Medicine in Cebu City, says he was inspired to create Medifund by Bless, who had trouble paying for her studies after her relatives ran into financial difficulty. The site is currently in public beta and has about 30 students waiting to sign up for fundraising campaigns when it goes live.

Onwude hopes Medifund will help increase the number of doctors in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and his native Nigeria. He also wants the site to enable more women to pursue medical training.

"There is a huge shortage of doctors in Asia and Africa," says Onwude. "In the Philippines, for example, one doctor might have to work in several hospitals."

Of course, every successful crowdfunding site needs to have quality-control measures in place. To make sure students signing up for donations on Medifund are serious about their goals, the site uses a gaming system that encourages students to add more details about their background, education and achievements. For example, badges are earned when they upload videos, transcripts, financial statements and school recommendations.

Over the next three months before its public launch, the Medifund team will further develop its platform, work with payment companies to ensure that donors in different countries can use the site and seek funding. Onwude is currently in talks with medical schools, NGOs and scholarship programs that are interested in partnering with Medifund.

Onwude says Medifund will take 5 percent of every fully funded project in order to keep the site running. As Medifund grows, Onwude says it will also launch a peer-to-peer education loan program and a reward system that allows donors to accumulate points for services like medical consultations.

The startup's founding team represents a multitude of nationalities and come from tech, design and medical backgrounds. Before entering medical school, Onwude, an alumnus of Hack2Hatch entrepreneurship camp, gained startup experience as founder of UnliFM and Pinoyborn. Other members of Medifund's team include Nanaho Nishiyama, previously a marketer at Nexseed and project manager at btrax, Michael Millan and Francis Alturas, designers at sym.ph, Dan Pantinople, designer and founder of Dee-oh! and Kent Astudillo, as well as sym.ph developers Fe Mojado and Richmond Wang.