If you all caught my blog post last month, you know I shared about a pretty incredible initiative that Johnson & Johnson launched for nurses. If you missed that post, you can find it here. If you’re a nurse that has an idea to help improve devices and/or patient care, you’ll definitely want to read it! Today though I want to share with you several others innovations led by Johnson & Johnson that are continuing to improve the healthcare field and overall safety of our patients. So whether you’re a nurse or a doctor, this applies to you! And if you’re neither, I think you’ll find what they are working on super interesting and meaningful.

The tech world seems to always be what people are focusing on when it comes to investing money, advancing products…I mean, I get it! The tech industry has come a long way and has made our life a lot easier. But what about our health? Isn’t that something that people should be equally concerned about investing in? Well, Johnson & Johnson is helping bridge that gap with a lot of the new projects they are working on. They are committed to ensuring that patients receive the best care possible which is why they are putting some much time and effort into providing opportunities for health care professionals to advance their education and improve their skills. I mean, if this isn’t a company you can get behind, I don’t know what its!

Right now Johnson & Johnson is working on five ways to revolutionize how doctors and nurses are trained around the world. One of them is virtual reality training for orthopedic surgeons and nurses. So what does this really mean? Well, with this virtual reality training surgeons and nurses are able to perform a procedure an infinite amount of times BEFORE performing it on an actual patient. Can we just take a moment to appreciate this? Those in the medical field go through an extensive amount of training but at the end of the day, they are still human and have to learn. And a lot of times we learn through making mistakes. But what if those mistakes could be done without potentially putting a patient in harm’s way? Enter virtual reality simulation. So how does it actually work? The healthcare provider will put on a headset and use the accompanied handheld devices and be able to virtually perform the procedure. The simulation has the same anatomical accuracy as the human body so surgeons and nurses can literally go through the exact steps that would involve performing a procedure such as a knee replacement. While this is just starting with the orthopedic specialty, this makes me so excited for what else is to come. Could you imagine if there was also virtual reality training for even more complex surgeries? An ex-lap, heart surgery, brain surgery. I mean, this really changes things for the medical field. It gives our health care professionals an opportunity to perfect their skills and gain confidence in the process.

Along the same lines, Johnson & Johnson created a program in 2014 called C-SATS, which essentially gives surgeons real-time feedback just mere hours after they perform an operation. Surgeons who are specializing in laparoscopic, robotic and open surgery can get a detailed analysis of the surgery they just performed almost immediately after completing it. This way they can assess their performance when the procedure is still fresh in their mind. This is done through a hardware device that is placed in the room which records the entire procedure. Afterward, it is uploaded to a HIPAA-compliant cloud platform where experts analyze the surgery and then provide feedback to the surgeons. Pretty amazing, huh?

These are just two of the five initiatives, and I highly recommend reading up on the rest of them! You can find the entire article and innovations here. For any doctors or nurses reading this, what are your thoughts? Or if you’ve been a patient before or know someone who has been a patient undergoing a procedure, how does this make you feel? Would love to hear your thoughts!!