BOSTON and NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Boston Children's Hospital and Klick Health today unveiled the HealthVoyager™ medical education and patient experience platform – a Proof of Concept that uses Virtual Reality (VR) technology to bring patients' individual medical findings to life in an immersive, 3D environment. The first iteration of the tool, HealthVoyager™ GI, has been designed for pediatric gastrointestinal (GI) patients and is being used at Boston Children's as part of a clinical study to validate its effect on patient and family understanding, engagement, and satisfaction.

By integrating into the clinical workflow of endoscopic procedures such as colonoscopies, HealthVoyager™ GI will enable Boston Children's gastroenterologists to custom-configure life-like, 3D anatomical imagery and take pediatric patients with conditions such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis on iPhone-based virtual tours of their GI tract. Aimed at creating an impactful, engaging, and memorable experience, the platform leverages modern technology to communicate a patient's personalized conditions and endoscopic findings.

Boston Children's performs thousands of endoscopic procedures each year. Of the 1.6 million Americans with inflammatory bowel disease, as many as 80,000 of them are children, according to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America.
Helping patients visualize their disease
Traditionally, gastroenterologists share endoscopy and colonoscopy findings with patients and their families using print outs that become part of a patient's medical record following the procedure. These clinical documents are highly text-based, written in medical language, some with static thumbnail images and are designed for medical documentation, not necessarily patient understanding.

"Putting myself in a nine-year-old's shoes, I can see HealthVoyager™ being a more fun and valuable way to learn about and share complicated information like endoscopic findings," said Michael Docktor, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist who co-developed the tool and Clinical Director of Innovation at Boston Children's Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator. "We hypothesize that the more children and their families can visualize and understand their disease, the more likely they may be to communicate when they have a particular symptom and adhere to their therapies."

Taking a Cue from Precision Medicine
HealthVoyager™ also takes a cue from Precision Medicine – the personalization of drug therapy and genomics for effective disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment – and aims to create Precision Education opportunities for patients and their families. Boston Children's Chief Innovation Officer John Brownstein, PhD, explained, "When you think about the care path of a patient journey, every aspect of that journey can be customized, including education. To ensure the best possible patient experience, Precision Education needs to be part of the Precision Medicine conversation as we create the future of healthcare."

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