The U.S. Army Research Lab’s Simulation and Training Technology Center needed a training solution that would be able to follow medical personnel anywhere in the world, enabling medics to train proficiently during their deployment.
“Burn care is such an important and specialized type of patient care. When not performed correctly, it can impact the patient’s mobility and overall quality of life forever. Working with the USAISR SMEs, who literally ‘write the book’ on burn care treatment, we learned there may be times when medics are deployed with little or no hands-on burn care experience. We’re honored for the opportunity to be part of this important training effort and give medics crucial knowledge on how to assess and treat a burn patient.” – BurnCARE Project Manager Marcia Clover
The Army was facing a serious and unavoidable reality: Medics in the field don’t always have hands-on burn care experience. This specialized type of patient care can be both painstaking and time-sensitive. When not performed properly, it can impact patients’ mobility and overall quality of life—for the rest of their lives.
Since the need for burn care can arise anytime, anywhere—and call into service medics who may never have treated burns before—making this training portable was imperative.
Portable training is complex to develop. It requires the expertise to make it realistic and the resources to make it relevant.
Virtual Heroes has more than a decade of expertise in creating true-to-life medical simulations, for organizations such as the Duke University Medical Center, George Washington University Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente, the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Our medical scenarios are built using Epic Games’ Unreal® Engine, the cutting-edge real-time 3D creation tool and the gold standard for photorealism and adaptability. (We’ve been using Unreal since the beginning and have built out the codebase significantly, adding innovations with each new project.)
Relevancy in medical simulations is determined by medical experts. We have long-standing partnerships with medical institutions and subject matter experts with deep knowledge of medical procedures, anatomy, and patient care. For this project, we worked with acclaimed experts at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (USAISR)—the sole combat Department of Defense burn care facility—and ARA’s own BioGears group, which specializes in creating validated physiological models. These experts ensure that the patient assessment and treatment steps are true to reality.
Virtual Heroes created BurnCARE, the Burn Computer Application for Research and Education.
It’s a solution that’s not just photorealistic but convenient—scalable enough to run on mobile devices, with or without an Internet connection—and easy for medical personnel to use. It’s also highly detailed, physiologically accurate, and replayable. Learners in any location can practice evaluation and treatment procedures again and again until they achieve repeatable success.
The BurnCARE program is transforming how the U.S. Army trains its medics to treat serious burn injuries. It has also opened up additional training possibilities. BurnCARE could become a valuable tool for global healthcare workers, including nurses, physician’s assistants, and doctors with varying levels of burn care expertise. Better-trained healthcare providers will mean better outcomes for patients around the world.
