Skip to main content

Serious Games For Operating Room Risk Management


Via: KTM Advance3D VOR (Virtual Operating Room)

3D VOR (Virtual Operating Room) is a collaborative and immersive Serious Game, under development by KTM Advance, targeting various defects in healthcare inside the OR due to a communication failure between the surgeons, the nursing staff, the anesthetists and the patient. 

The OR setting is one of the most frequent targets of healthcare malpractice suits.

Inside the operating room (OR), communication and anticipation are key for the patient's safety during and after the intervention. This is the context for the game that offers a multi-professional in-service training to every stakeholder in the operating room.

The game is centered on the effects of the communication between the surgeon, the nursing staff and the anesthetists upon crisis prevention and risk management inside the OR (control procedures, patient checklist).

Through 4 virtual surgery operations chosen on purpose (routine versus infrequent, benign versus vital, etc.) and carefully reenacted, the game explores the many reasons of a failure in the OR that can be related to bad communication.

To ensure that the learners collectively understand why an incident in the OR would occur as the mere result of an ineffective communication or a conflict, an intelligent debriefing is proposed in the same manner as mortality morbidity conferences (MMC).

3D VOR is a collaborative research project selected within the framework of the Single Inter-Ministry Fund 12th Call for Projects.

The Single Inter-Ministry Fund is a French program designed to assist in the development of new products and services with high innovation content, likely to reach the market within 5 years. The Single Inter-Ministry Fund (FUI) is restricted to funding R&D projects accredited by competitiveness clusters, while the projects must guarantee economic benefits for the country as a whole. With approximately 130 million euros available each year, the Single Inter-Ministry Fund issues two calls each year for project proposals.

KTM Advance and Novamotion have partnered with research experts in the fields of artificial intelligence (IRIT), ergonomics (CCLE) didactics (EFTS), healthcare (Toulouse University Hospital) and the Serious Game Research Network (Champollion University).

The picture is an illustration of the prototype currently being tested

The first working single player prototype was released in August 2014 and the multi-player prototype, integrating artificial intelligence, is expected for early 2015.