SimuVersity Medical Center: Pain and Opioid Management Training in Diverse Patient Populations

Management of chronic pain and opioid use/misuse is challenging for clinicians and students, especially when working with diverse and underserved patient populations, and very few low-cost, flexible, highly-engaging, and effective learning resources are available to help the healthcare workforce best learn to manage these unique health concerns. Gamification holds promise as a user-friendly, fun, engaging and effective teaching strategy, especially for healthcare applications. SimuVersity Medical Center is an immersive 3D gaming platform that will engage students and practicing clinicians in a unique and captivating learning experience focused on pain and opioid management in diverse patient groups.

SimuVersity Medical Center is an innovative platform solution to education and training in specialty topics in healthcare. This novel learning platform will permit learners to explore a 3D virtual hospital space and can interact with objects, virtual colleagues/trainers and virtual patients (imbued with artificial intelligence) to learn and practice new clinical skills. The platform is built for ease-of-use with simple character controls that non-game-savvy learners find intuitive and easy. The graphical interface is clean and clear and the software runs on all modern computing platforms. The control intervention consists of traditional powerpoint slide-based training and text-base case studies for review.

This study aims to compare the effectiveness of the new educational activity/game (a novel, engaging digital-training plus interaction with virtual patients to practice skills) in meeting clinical learning objectives and outcomes compared to traditional didactic (powerpoint slide-based training and text-base case scenarios) approaches to provider and student education and satisfaction.

Inclusion criteria

• Ages 18-80 years
• English-speaking
• Graduate-level health professional students and faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina
• Willingness to volunteer to play the new educational game and complete questionnaires regarding satisfaction, knowledge acquisition, value, ease of use and ability to meet learning objectives

Exclusion criteria

• Age outside the predefined range
• Not a student or faculty at MUSC
• Not willing or able to participate in the learning activity or complete study related questionnaires.