Meta is holding back VR’s huge healthcare potential
by Andrew Smith
As the VR industry eagerly tracks holiday consumer sales of the Quest 2 and Meta’s plans to create a VR-accessible Metaverse, it’s worth noting the one area for virtual reality that the Internet giant continues to largely ignore: Healthcare.
When it was still known as Facebook, Meta piloted some valuable healthcare outreach, such as a partnership with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). However, this and other initiatives seem solely targeted at VR-based training for healthcare providers — and not for patient therapy and comfort.
Or to put it another way: Surgeons have any number of VR platforms to learn operating techniques, but where’s the VR platform for my grandmother recovering from chemotherapy?
It’s not as if Facebook’s current VR roadmap is solid: While Quest 2’s holiday sales are likely to be strong, it’s far from being a mass market product. Still considered a pricey peripheral for gamers that lacks a killer app for general consumers, Meta’s ambitions to create a VR driven office environment, let alone a Metaverse, are still very much in doubt.
Healthcare, by contrast, is one of the few industries that everyone eventually uses. And its addressable market is staggering. Consider:
There are roughly 4000 US hospitals which on an average day, process millions of patients. And these are not average times, with COVID greatly (and tragically) increasing that daily intake. Most of these patients spend the majority of their time waiting — either in a waiting area to receive care, or in a patient’s room, as they prepare for or recover from treatment.
VR has demonstrative power to immerse the user in an experience that takes them out of their surroundings; there are hundreds of simple VR apps which transport them to soothing locations, or involve them in relaxing casual games where time seems to slip away. And with a $299 starting MRSP, the Quest 2 system costs roughly the same amount as the standard television that’s a staple in most hospital waiting lounges and individual patient rooms.
As currently architected, however, Meta’s VR platform isn’t conducive to healthcare.
Quest’s unnecessarily complex set-up process is a key friction point: While it’d be relatively simple for a healthcare worker to sanitize an HMD and set it up for a bedridden patient, it’s far too much to expect them also to navigate the Quest’s 3D menus to find and launch a VR app.
And that only hints at the even larger barrier:
The current mandatory Facebook log-in for the Quest 2’s consumer mode is a super prohibitor in healthcare, where patient and employee confidentiality is sacrosanct. And while Facebook is planning to phase out that log-in requirement this year, it’s yet unclear whether a new log-in system will be private enough for a health provider environment.
This is all somewhat ironic, since Mark Zuckerberg literally has his name emblazoned on a top California hospital. For not much more than the $75 million he donated to the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, Meta could easily launch a pilot program to help make VR easily available across healthcare. It might involve a licensing program for healthcare orgs which removes the user id log-in requirement and instead, offers a streamlined user experience customized for providers and their patients. (It would need to be as simple as getting an Oculus headset shipped to them in a FedEx box, completely ready for patients to use, once it’s plugged in.) For patients, almost all of whom have never tried VR before, it should be enjoyable from the moment the headset is slipped on — no app store, just a small pre-curated menu of apps ideal for seated or bedridden patients that they can instantly enter with a single click.
We’re hopeful Meta sees the opportunity here — especially at this time when its role in society is under such widespread scrutiny. For its own part, as I wrote last year, the healthcare industry would do well to meet VR halfway. Overall, we see too little innovation around patient comfort, while legacy health institutions tend to be intimidated by relatively unknown hardware.
When I’ve broached the topic of VR to healthcare executives, their reply is a variation of, “Sounds promising — but we need to see much more clinical trials before trying this out.” So to that, I’d ask: Why hesitate to experiment with consumer technology like VR, when the corrosive effects of the televisions in your waiting rooms have long been established?
Andrew Smith is President of Inflect Health as well as Chief Operations and Innovation Officer at Vituity, responsible for driving innovative businesses that disrupt the status quo and transform the healthcare construct. In addition to spearheading investments, partnerships, and strategies for the organization, he also serves as a board member for Vituity’s philanthropic foundation, Vituity Cares.
