A VR benchmark for surgical training: what OSSO VR does

OSSO VR is a Palo Alto, California company founded in 2016 by Justin Barad, MD, an orthopedic surgeon trained at UCLA and Harvard. Its platform places a trainee in an immersive operating environment with hands-on interaction, and it was designed for medical device companies, practicing surgeons, residents and medical students.

The feature that sets it apart in its 2020 description is assessment. OSSO VR was presented as the first training platform to build assessment into its modules, scoring a trainee's knowledge of the procedural steps, the level of precision and the overall efficiency. The result works as a VR benchmark: a measurable record of proficiency that a program or a device maker can compare across learners.

A newsletter on health care and technology, Future Pulse from Politico, noted in October 2020 that the pandemic had shaken medical education harder than almost any other field. In that report, OSSO VR said inquiries had grown tenfold from the start of the pandemic. The company also announced a $14 million Series A round led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures, which was described as the largest investment yet in VR surgical training. At that time it reported use at more than 20 teaching hospitals and 11 medical device companies in 20 countries.

Those numbers are the company's own statements from 2020 and the company's website now gives newer figures.

The official site at ossovr.com is online and describes OSSO VR as a procedural-skills training platform for health care, used by more than 100,000 health care professionals worldwide, a figure given by the company. It still names Justin Barad as co-founder, now with the description pediatric orthopedic surgeon, and still dates the company to 2016.

The product range has widened. The site lists Osso Enterprise, which offers custom-developed VR modules, Osso Academy for early-career clinicians, and a nurse training line called the Osso VR Nursing Series, delivered with a web-based platform named Osso Loop. Pricing is available on request. For research, the company points to two studies on orthopedic training: one by McKinney and colleagues from 2022 that it summarizes as a 67 percent reduction in instructor prompts, and one by Orland and colleagues from 2020 that it summarizes as procedural competence scores up to 300 percent higher than with traditional methods alone. These are the company's summaries of the studies, and the underlying papers were not opened for this article.