Second Life for Health Care
I am a little disappointed that I have not had the opportunity to truly experiment Second Life. I created an account and worked with Ben last Wednesday for about an hour after all personal attempts failed. For some ungodly reason, I am still not able to use Second Life. I have invited a digital native to my house tomorrow to assist me in getting my computer to obey and always listen to and follow my hearts desires. I am also looking forward to the day I will be able to change my status from digital immigrant to a native.
However, I reviewed the videos posted by Ben and did some reading on Second Life and I believe I can confidently write commentary on the uses of Second Life in doctor-patient relationships.
As every consumer of health care continues to look at the cost of health care as a huge burden, while organizations are looking at innovative ways to make it more cost effective and efficient. Also the continued improvements in information technology hardware and software have drawn the attention of health care leaders.
Second Life, which is a virtual reality environment, has a place in cost effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of health care in the near future. According to the data provided in Dr. Yellowlees lectures, Second Life currently has 10 million registered users, 150-200,000 users online at any given time, young, well off, males. As more users become familiar with the site and its potentials, it may develop to level similar to how video conferencing and e-mail is used in doctor-patient relationships today. In my opinion, I think the true potential will be in the area of education and awareness, support, training and promotion of health services.
Education and Awareness: Second Life will be good in this environment because a clinician can actually fine-tune their clinical skills without fear of causing any bodily damage or putting someone in a life threatening situation in real life. After proficiency in this environment, the skills can be transferred to fist life to benefit real life environments; people are most comfortable with fantasy environment in tuning up their skills because of the no risk of harming anyone and anonymity encourages bold and confident behavior, the awareness of drills like in disaster clinic for bio-terrorism enable people to practice what other wise would have been in-practical in real life environments.
Support: Second Life is a good environment to have support groups in diseases that are not socially acceptable conditions. People will be more comfortable and open in the discussion of their issues due to the anonymity.
Training and Promotion of health Services: This is an environment that can support training and promotion of health care services. Health training requires a lot of practice to develop proficiencies. Simulation of real life can be conducted in this environment and once health professionals become comfortable, that skill can be transferred to real life environments. Health promotion could be encouraged by having consumers of health care to do a dry run on any situation they may encounter in real life, example: Consumers preparing for physical therapy can to go through the processes of the projected his/her intended services to measure what could be the outcome.
Having written all of this about Second Life, I think it is not ready for prime time yet. First it has to work on simplification to make it easier for digital immigrants to navigate. Second, it should continue to work on creating awareness of its existence to cover a diversified group of potential users and to target university health service programs so that the site could be a place of choice for clinical rotations and health care research studies.
