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The Sim Cafe~
The Sim Cafe~
From Graphic Design to Healthcare Tech: Lynn Welch on Revolutionizing Patient Care with AI and VR
Ever wondered how a graphic designer ends up revolutionizing healthcare with cutting-edge technology? Join us as Lynn Welch takes us on a thrilling journey from her early days at a government think tank to breaking new ground in military and healthcare simulations. Discover her remarkable contributions to DARPA and the U.S. Army, and how her expertise became crucial during the 9-11 response. Fast forward to her current groundbreaking work at Lucid Reality Labs, where she's now blending AI and XR technologies to transform patient care and training.
In this episode, we tackle the latest advancements in healthcare technology and cybersecurity, including Lynn’s pivotal collaboration with major tech giants to enhance data security. Get the inside scoop on a pioneering project with Doxy.Me, aimed at creating a virtual phobia treatment system. Lynn also sheds light on how generative AI and VR are revolutionizing the healthcare industry, making immersive learning more accessible and efficient. Tune in to learn how a younger, tech-savvy workforce is driving rapid adoption of these innovative tools, supported by substantial investments from the likes of Meta and Apple.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-welch-522b51/
Email for Lynn Welch: lynnwelch@lucidrealitylabs.com
https://lucidrealitylabs.com/
Innovative SimSolutions.
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The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Sim Solutions or our sponsors. This week's podcast is sponsored by Innovative Sim Solutions. Are you interested in the journey of simulation accreditation? Do you plan to design a new simulation center or expand your existing center? What about taking your program to the next level? Give Deb Tauber from Innovative Sim Solutions a call to support you in all your simulation needs. With years of experience, deb can coach your team to make your simulation dreams become reality. Learn more at www. innovativesimsolutions. com or just reach out to Deb Contact today. Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber, an co-host Jerrod Jeffries, our host De b Tauber as they sit down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.
Deb Tauber:Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Welcome Jerrod, welcome Lynn Welch. Today we have Lynn Welch and Lynn. Thank you so much for being a guest. Where are you at right now?
Lynn Welch:I am sitting in Arizona. My husband and I ran away from home during COVID, left Washington DC and relocated out to the Phoenix area, so I am enjoying year-round sunshine.
Deb Tauber:Perfect, perfect Jerrod, where are you at?
Jerrod Jeffries:I'm at it calling out of Copenhagen, Denmark, so we're from all different locations.
Deb Tauber:So, Lynn, why don't you go ahead and tell us about your journey you have a very, very fascinating story and tell our listeners about yourself and how you got started.
Lynn Welch:I've had a very fun adventure in the simulation space, starting when I was 21 years old. I am, believe it or not, I am an artist by training and I was working at a government think tank in the Washington DC area. I had done an internship in the Pentagon, was hired out of the Pentagon into a government think tank as a graphic designer and in the first six months I was there one of the division directors came downstairs into the publications department where I was working and said, hey, is there an artist in here? And they said yeah, we just hired one. And they said here, come upstairs for a minute. And they took me upstairs and threw me in a fighter simulator and said, tell us what's wrong with this gaming environment.
Lynn Welch:And this was back in 91, or actually 1990. And it was one of the first immersive environments created for dismounted infantry training. The armies foray into looking at simulation technology for training and readiness. They were moving in the same direction that, of course, aviation and the Navy had already been spearheading for several years. So I had the good fortune to start working as a designer on that gaming team and I spent the next seven years building immersive environments across several different applications for DARPA and for the US Army. And that was my start in simulation 1990 or 91?
Lynn Welch:1990., and I worked in that capacity on some really fascinating projects. One of the immersive databases I built was used on 9-11 for the only civil support team that could detect chemical and biological radiological issuance in the area. They were able to respond on 9-11 and understand if any of the devices and any of the planes that went into the towers had any biological or radiological material. So I've been very fortunate that some of the simulations I've been involved in have had great impact and, of course, all of us on the healthcare side. We're so passionate about what we do and I worked in some areas of Homeland Security for a few years after working actively in the simulation military sim space, and I was recruited to join Education Management Solutions back in 2012.
Lynn Welch:And that began my healthcare simulation journey. Interestingly enough, I went to a military conference that same year and I had been offered the opportunity at EMS and I was mulling it over and didn't know much how it was being applied on the healthcare side, and one of my mentors from when I worked at the government think tank as a very young person was there. So I asked him what he, what was his opinion, what should I do? He said, Lynn, you jump in with both feet right now. You were on the wave of the first gaming revolution on the military side. Healthcare is where it's going to happen next and at the end of your career you're going to have the most interesting story of all of us because you're going to have ridden two waves of innovation and, coming from my mentor, that meant a lot.
Lynn Welch:I jumped in with both feet and started my adventure on the simulation side of healthcare, and where I am now I've come a bit full circle and I'm back in the immersive side of simulation with Lucid Reality Labs, and we work primarily in virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality experiences. 75% of all of our work is for health care and medical technology, pharma and a lot of what we design is used by our clients to deliver patient care. And that's what I'm most excited about is to see how fast XR technology and simulations being adopted for creating novel therapeutics, new novel therapies specifically for neural rehab and mental health care, expanding access to health care so you can receive more insightful and meaningful and impactful treatment right in your home, and also to look at how fast this is moving. On a pure technology side, we're doing a lot with artificial intelligence and integrating it in the actual device infrastructures used for patient care. So it's been an amazing journey for me so far and a lot more to come.
Jerrod Jeffries:That's incredible. I mean that spans decades. One but two, obviously, the industries and, to your words, the different waves. I mean you've probably seen some similarities but, of course, a lot of differences. Has there been any stark contrast between the two different waves?
Lynn Welch:No, you know it's interesting. There's also a lot of common problems between the two ways. You know, if you look at military simulation, they're still really trying to solve that true interoperability challenge. And as we look at health care simulation, and particularly the intersection between patient delivery and patient practice and the education side on the undergraduate, residency and continuing healthcare education there's still that challenge of how do you knit those together and the interoperability, how do you make sure data is accessible across that? How do you cross, measure clinical competencies and therapeutic approaches through that entire chain of care? And on the military side you had the same problem how do you knit together these different weapon systems? How do you get a theater-wide view? And you see a lot in the defense community. They're still trying to solve that and as technology evolves it's making it easier and faster to adapt new technologies and bring them into common operating systems. So I think those are some of the. I see more commonalities versus differences in the waves. There's just a lot of the same kind of technology challenges they're trying to solve.
Jerrod Jeffries:Then you know, moving into the lucid reality labs is with these therapy. Are you seeing similar challenges? Or what's the most important problem you're solving now with Lucid Reality Labs?
Lynn Welch:To me, number one when it comes to healthcare and this is something we focus heavily on is HIPAA protection of the patient data and the cybersecurity. One of the biggest shifts I've seen in my role with Lucid Reality Labs is we're working directly with a lot of the strategic planners across a lot of the big technology companies. All of them want to get into healthcare and a lot of them are really partnering closely with us and other companies like us that are providing some of these therapeutic solutions to understand from the headset, through the integration software channels, how do we integrate back into healthcare systems electronic health records, learner record systems within organizations, how do we keep all that data secure and private? And we've done some projects with one of the largest telehealth providers in the United States. They recently launched they recently launched a phobia treatment that's 100% virtual, intended to be delivered in the home. So we are going through the first HIPAA certification of that system with them right now, along with Meta. So we've been working very closely with our Meta partners on understanding how does all this technology connect together? How do we keep it secure? And the next step will be integrating that back into electronic health records and clinical notes and all of those elements. So those are really exciting.
Lynn Welch:So a couple of years ago I was more in our traditional higher ed and continuing education healthcare space. I didn't have 10 different contacts at Meta I talked with. I wasn't talking to the leadership at HTC Vive. I wasn't talking to Qualcomm and NVIDIA about here's some security lockdown elements that can be embedded in the next version, just to share our feedback. So it's been really exciting. I'm very excited to see Meta and Apple really focusing on the healthcare space and when you get big investment from a research and development and interest, that provides growth for all the sectors in our market. So that's what I'm most excited about really getting to go to the Consumer Electronics Show and sit down and get an inside look at what's coming out next and how that can be applied to healthcare. So really a chance to literally sit on the cutting edge and help drive it forward. So every day is an adventure.
Jerrod Jeffries:Incredible and I love how it all started from, you know as an artist back in the 90s, of where it's matured to and all the different areas you've been able to grow and contribute to. So thank you.
Deb Tauber:Yeah, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about the phobia?
Lynn Welch:The phobia treatment is so fascinating. Our client, doxyme it's probably the largest company you may not have heard of, but they provide a huge amount of the back-end telehealth technology infrastructure and they were quite interested in providing a different option for delivering telehealth. They have a million providers in their network, so they received a grant and selected us to help them build out a product to treat phobias. So we started with the most common phobias, which are spiders and snakes and dogs, and we wanted to create a platform that would be completely secure, so that the therapist could be in a live session with their patient in a fully virtual environment and creating that third safe space, and so we also wanted to make sure that the patient felt very comfortable in that environment. We worked very closely with the DocsEme clinical team to understand in immersion therapy, which is the standard treatment for phobia, what are the most important things as they begin to introduce a phobia trigger into an environment, which traditionally had happened in a therapeutic clinical workspace where you go to a office and you sit down with your therapist, and there's a lot of reasons why that can create additional anxiety to someone struggling with phobia. So we actually had an opportunity to interview several of their therapists and brainstorm what would an ideal environment look like for a patient? And we really thought about approaching it from a mixed reality point of view. Would they be more comfortable in their own home, where they could see their physical surroundings and then see the therapist in a virtual form and then have a phobia trigger? And they discarded that, because putting the phobia trigger in their actual home environment can create a cascade of other issues. So they told us no, no, we want a third space, and they were very specific about the kind of colors, even down to the paintings on the wall and the entire environment. We designed an environment where both the therapist and the patient can select and customize an avatar to fit how they prefer to see themselves on that particular day, and it provides a secure login for the therapist to schedule the session and the patient to log in. So we make sure that data is being encrypted properly in a secure fashion, as would be appropriate for an actual therapeutic session.
Lynn Welch:Once they're in the session, then the therapist has full control of everything that happens after that. Both the patient and the therapist can see and hear each other's actions, and in real time, and the therapist can select the type of phobia they want to work on that day. They can select the species, the breed of dog or the type of snake or the type of spider. There's a whole library of them. They can control where that phobia trigger is located. They can place it in a picture on the wall to start a very gradual introduction or they can actually place an active, animated version of that trigger in the room.
Lynn Welch:But they also can select how active it is. Is it passive, neutral or aggressive? How large is it? They can control the size of that trigger and the level of activity and the idea is that over multiple sessions then the patient is going to become more and more comfortable with that trigger in the room with different levels of activity. So it's a safe way to perform immersion therapy, deliver immersion therapy, without causing additional traumatic impact. So it's a very interesting approach. We've had wonderful feedback and wonderful results from the study that's ongoing and we'll be starting the next phase of development on that project in the fall.
Deb Tauber:So about the study, how many participants have you had thus far?
Lynn Welch:I believe there are several dozen. I would need to get the specifics for you, deb, from our client. So I can certainly reach out to Triton at doxyme, and you may find him an interesting podcast guest too, because his team were the innovators that began looking at all of the technology and looking at how can we do more, and they settled on immersion therapy. So they may be a great guest for you as well.
Jerrod Jeffries:Thank you for that, and so just so I'm clear too, that was a great example with the phobia. But you're also outside healthcare. It's med tech, pharma defense, and was it aerospace.
Lynn Welch:Defense and aerospace, and we also have a wonderful sector of our business for leisure and entertainment and we get to do some purely fun work for Universal Studios, a really amazing and interesting augmented reality projects. That lets us flex our pure creative muscles. And we also do quite a bit of work for Carnival Cruise Lines. We've built digital twins of quite a bit of their of their cruise line chips down to extreme detail and they have a really fascinating approach to integrating that XR and the digital twins across their operations globally. So really a fascinating project where we're bringing more real-time information, artificial intelligence and augmented reality to support day to day operations and customer facing workflows.
Jerrod Jeffries:OK, that's. That's incredible, I mean, because it's also spread so different. I mean I guess there's a lot of overlap in terms of platform development or whatever else, but to be able to again, in your words, stretch your creative minds and put it in the leisure place. But it's all education, training, operations, at the end of the day, in some way shape or form. But it's also still so relevant for all these different areas.
Lynn Welch:One of the things that really is common across all of those is creating engaging workspaces and engaging therapeutic spaces, and we find that the more experiential rich any of those models are, the better the outcomes are, whether it's a manufacturing workflow, quality assurance process, all the way down to delivering a completely different approach to the customer experience.
Deb Tauber:Now, Lynn
Deb Tauber:, you talked about it being fun. What can you specifically speak to? Something that's really fun about it? You have such a an incredible amount of insight to this topic of virtual reality, which for many of us is is really new. And you know novel, sure, it's been around, you know, when you think about the conferences at IMSH and in NASCL and different places, how the virtual reality thing I mean, I just remember maybe 67 years ago seeing it for the first time, and now it's just just so much faster, better, smarter, right.
Lynn Welch:What's amazing from my perspective having first jumped into the virtual world when I was 21, and that was one or two years ago yeah, Having first jumped in then what I really see as the real game changer is the ability to generate content and share content. And to me, even up until the middle of COVID, I was speaking to a group of investors and they wanted to jump into the VR space and I said throttle down on that, because access to content is still a challenge. Building content is expensive. Sharing content is challenging. Common content libraries still are challenging to build and very intensive and labor heavy. They are expensive. A lot of companies can't invest in that, and one of the things I quickly found that's happened in my perspective over 18 months is the rapid innovation of tool sets that anyone can use, that are out of the box, driven by AI. So generative content is here, it's accessible and you see quite a few companies being able to productize those and bring those to the market. We're going to see a huge growth in the ability to rapidly generate and share scenarios, common model libraries, because a lot of the innovation is here for the generative AI. Because a lot of the innovation is here for the generative AI. We use a lot of it in our own technology stack and one of the things we realized is our clients, as they continue to want to grow their patient treatment modalities, for therapists to build their own scenarios, for clinicians to customize their training.
Lynn Welch:We're seeing in a lot of our work with the med tech companies we partner very closely with, we build out a lot of digital twins of their devices, build those workflows. Their clients are no longer, as don't have as much of an appetite for sending staff to a training center, to a brick and mortar training center, for three or four days. Three or four days if they can have a virtual training tool that augments that, they can send a smaller number of staff and then train more widely. Those individuals trained in person can come back, leverage the VR tools and continue to train the rest of their clinical staff. This is particularly useful when, given the amount of turnover you see in the healthcare provider space and being able to capture that training and scale it is critically important to our healthcare systems. So these are some areas where we see this rapidly growing.
Lynn Welch:Being able to include low-code scenario and model generation is enormously helpful to let healthcare systems customize the training specific to their own needs at their own site. And as we see our work with the med tech companies, they're building these amazing innovative technologies but they significantly disrupt clinical workflows. And being able to have that training tool that's a just-in-time training tool where you can grab a headset, pop it on during a break, get a little familiar with what your role is in, for example, setting up an OR room for a specific procedure. If you have a new device in there, that's very disruptive. You need to have some time to practice at your own pace so you're comfortable setting that OR up specifically for the surgeon you're working with that day, Customized for the individual or for that room or environment and whatever else and some of what we build for the med tech companies.
Lynn Welch:It also lets their salespeople, when they're going into a hospital client, be able to quickly build the 3D model of what that particular let's say it's a piece of lab equipment. How is that going to fit in that specific actual environment? Well, we build solutions where they can go in with an iPad. They can scan a room quickly with their camera on their iPad. That entire 3D environment gets modeled on the fly and they can drop their device down inside the client's actual setting so they can actually run simulations and understand. Okay, this is how this piece of lab equipment is either going to assist or create a challenge in my existing workflows, both from a logistics and operational perspective, as well as a staffing perspective.
Jerrod Jeffries:Is there a pattern you find that it actually creates more challenges or it makes it more efficient, or is it just so dependent?
Lynn Welch:Well, in the one MedTech client we build this solution for, it's cut their sales cycle down from over 12 months to three. Oh, ok, yeah.
Deb Tauber:And I can speak to from working in the emergency department for so long. If you were to have, you know, like the top 10 emergencies and be able to practice just in the break room and using because there's so much equipment to it putting in chest tubes, central lines, all those high risk, low frequency events but to just be able to put some goggles on and, kind of practice, walk through it and then when the actual emergency comes in, you're prepared.
Lynn Welch:And where we start seeing all of our collective work tie back together is the younger workforce that's coming in. They're asking their supervisors why don't we have this? I had this in the sim lab. Why don't we have this? So they're expecting it, they demand it, it's. They don't want to spend hours in a classroom, they don't want death by PowerPoint. They don't want these dry refresher courses that they have to have. They want experiential learning when they have time and they want to be able to measure their own ability to apply it.
Deb Tauber:The problem is the laggards right.
Lynn Welch:Well, a rising tide right Raises all ships. But one thing I truly believe that COVID, as awful and terrible as it was, it has accelerated the adoption of immersive learning. It's pushed it forward five years at least.
Deb Tauber:Agree.
Lynn Welch:And I think what's going to continue that accelerated growth is the support and the tools we're getting from the big tech investment in immersive. We continue to see just amazing generative AI tools coming out every day. I know in monitoring my internal company communications, we live on Slack and we are a global company, so we're fully virtual and our team is all over the world, but every single day, one of my team is pulling in a new generative AI tool and saying, hey, go try this. And we use them every day ourselves. And we've actually taken our seven years. We actually started in 2016. So our seven plus years of experience, we've actually created packages on all of our best design and development practices and tools and we're putting those out into a subscription model available platform for our clients to pick up what we've already built for them and continue building on their own.
Jerrod Jeffries:Actually, I've learned so much during this conversation, lynn, so thank you, because I also didn't know there was this low to no code, almost models for creating content. I mean that to me is where there's such a heavy cost and when it's streamlined, it's really, really helpful for, obviously, the end user, but to be able to easily digest that and consume that as the end user is, of course, extremely advantageous.
Lynn Welch:The other innovation we've pushed out that I have to say I'm the most excited about is what we've been doing with artificial intelligence. We do a lot of work with Medtronic. They have a wonderful product for intubation called the MAC video laryngoscope and we had built a digital twin of that and modeled eight different patients with different levels of difficult airways, which was a lot of sophisticated algorithms to create that haptic feedback. As you're putting the McGrath down in and going through the motions, it also has real clinical data on the video monitor of the actual patient who had the difficult airway. So you're kind of fusing reality with VR. But one of the things we noticed when we go to a lot of conferences and events with Medtronic to help them present this solution one of the things we noticed to a lot of conferences and events with Medtronic to help them present this solution One of the things we noticed is a lot of the clinicians and the residents that would jump into the experience.
Lynn Welch:At conferences like the American Society of Anesthesiology they were asking questions in the VR headset. They would literally ask a question out loud while they're in the VR headset and guess what? Nobody's answering it. There are prompts in the VR experience but it's not answering their specific question.
Lynn Welch:So we had the opportunity to team with Dr Patrick Schroedker, who's the worldwide expert in video laryngoscope-assisted intubation. He's 30 years running the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Luzon and has been teaching and driving their curriculum. He asked us what if you could bottle my 30 years of knowledge? So we created a digital twin of Dr Patrick and put him in the experience and we worked with him to build the logic database for the artificial intelligence engine behind him. He now, when you have a question and you're in that experience you ask Dr Patrick a question, he answers you, he gives you additional references and this way we're making sure when somebody has a question it doesn't go unanswered and we're also seeing the time to intubate significantly drop based on that, and he watches what you're doing, gives you a few hints. So we find it fascinating this concept that you can bring that attending physician in and scale access to this critical knowledge through these artificial intelligence engines backed by the correct logic database.
Deb Tauber:That's amazing, absolutely fascinating, but so needed.
Lynn Welch:And they're fast really Alex I mean. One example of that same conference last October I heard Dr Patrick come up behind me. We were in the middle of working on it. I heard his voice and I heard him in AI over and over again in the experience. So I told him, dr Patrick, and I heard him in AI over and over again in the experience. So I told him, dr Patrick, and he wanted to refine the visuals for him and refine his voice.
Lynn Welch:So my CEO, alex, who was there with me, he walked around and took one video walking around him for maybe less than a minute of video to get his micro expressions as he was talking. We recorded three minutes of his audio, his micro expressions as he was talking. We recorded three minutes of his audio. And I took off the next morning flying from San Francisco to Orlando for virtual reality augmented reality association event down there. And I got off the plane on Monday and got into the restaurant to eat dinner. On Slack it popped up and here's all Dr Patrick fully rendered. They had remapped all of the new characteristics and the new voice.
Deb Tauber:Wow.
Lynn Welch:And that's in less than 24 hours. This is how fast we can build these things because the tools are becoming accessible, and I think that's what I'm most excited about is we now have the ability to really have no limits in what we can create, produce and deliver.
Jerrod Jeffries:That's insane.
Deb Tauber:Thank you so much. Is there anything you want to leave our listeners with Gosh? So many things, but.
Lynn Welch:I think the most important thing is to me none of this continues to happen if people like you and Jared you know, you, deb and Jared and myself and everyone else that's in our simulation space keep pushing. And I know there's a surgeon who's just come out with a really innovative surgical procedure that's leveraging the Apple Vision Pro and he's just so dynamic and totally changing how surgical workflows are happening in operating rooms. And Dr Masson said something that I have stolen from him and his recommendation is when you see something really compelling, you jump.
Lynn Welch:You jump hard. So I told Robert I was going to modify that Jump hard and reach out and grab others and take them over with you, yep.
Deb Tauber:I like that. Yeah, I love it, but we all need to keep pushing hard.
Lynn Welch:We've got the tools now, and now it's just really driving those, driving that innovation forward, and we all have the tools to do it. It's just a matter of our communities staying together and staying focused and continuing to push, because I really feel we have not even seen the start of where this is going.
Deb Tauber:I agree. Well, thank you so lucidrealitylabs. com and we appreciated having you very much and we will keep in touch and if our listeners want to get ahold of you for any questions, where can they go, Lynn?
Lynn Welch:They can go to our website at lucidrealitylabscom and my email is really easy to remember. Reach out to me on LinkedIn or my email, which is lynnwelch at lucidrealitylabscom. Perfect.
Jerrod Jeffries:Thank you. This is fascinating, Lynn. Really I love this.
Lynn Welch:Thank you so much and have a great day. I look forward to the next podcast too. www. innovativesimsolutions.
Disclaimer/ Innovative Sim Solutions/ Intro:Thanks, Thanks to Innovative Sim Solutions for sponsoring this week's podcast. Innovative Sim Solutions will make your plans for your next Sim Center a reality. Contact Deb Tauber and her team today. Thanks for joining us here at the Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed. Visit us at wwwinnovativesimsolutionscom and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Innovative Sim Solutions is your one-stop shop for your simulation needs. A turnkey solution.
