SimX Spotlight: How Mashpee Middle-High School Uses SimX’s Virtual Reality for Real-World Medical Experience | Virtual Reality Medical Simulation

This post is part of a SimX user spotlight series highlighting our amazing community of learners and healthcare educators worldwide.

SimX customer, Mashpee Middle-High School, is integrating our marketplace of simulated patient encounters in their 7-12 grade technical and career preparation courses.

Mashpee Middle-High School is a proven leader in their field with an innovative approach to secondary education. They provide students with opportunities to find their career paths through experiential exploration and sequential course offerings starting in grade seven. Mashpee has several educational pathways available to students, including the health sciences, aligning core academics with career and technical courses.

Mashpee educators aim to provide students with genuine and immersive experiences in the healthcare field. However, shadowing or student internships are challenging and limited by the availability of local experts and patient privacy. To meet their educational goals and learning objectives, Mashpee explored solutions that would expose students to realistic patient encounters in a controlled, safe, and accessible environment.

Mike Looney, Director of Career and Technical Education at Mashpee Middle-High School, was first made aware of SimX while conducting research in the VR medical training field. He discovered that SimX had the right healthcare training software and content to bridge the gap between classroom learning and hands-on experience with accessible and realistic virtual patient encounters.

Looney recognized that with SimX, Mashpee students and educators can experience a variety of patient interactions across multiple specialties. Engaging with virtual patients gives students numerous opportunities to communicate, collaborate, engage, and solve problems in real-time. Mr. Looney said this about SimX: “Considering the SimX platform is immersive, visual, and interactive, it meets students where they are. We have found that immersive, hands-on, experiential experiences are more engaging than traditional classroom lessons.”

SimX hosts the largest marketplace of virtual patient encounters, allowing educators and facilitators to create custom curriculums that meet their learning objectives. Users can engage with patient encounters from various specialties in diverse environments to meet learners where they are.

At Mashpee Middle-High School, SimX’s fully immersive platform is being utilized by educators and administrators in combination with the expertise of local industry professionals. Educators and administrators have a goal to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of careers in healthcare and to support the future pipeline of healthcare workers in their region. They will work to accomplish these goals by using the SimX system to supplement a comprehensive learning experience for students in grades 7-12. With SimX, Mashpee educators can build an accessible and immersive curriculum that will evolve and grow along with the needs and interests of each student.

To fully take advantage of the SimX platform, they will engage instructors inside and outside their institution. These outside educators will be industry professionals, including nurses, paramedics, and EMTs from their local community. Through SimX, VR at Mashpee Middle-High School will continue to advance without the constraints and difficulties that often block access to similar experiences in healthcare education.

The SimX and Mashpee Middle-High School partnership provides students with a promising experiential environment focused on authentic experiences and comprehensive learning. Looney said about their SimX experience: “The introduction of VR has been a huge success! We have introduced the SimX platform to students, staff, healthcare providers, fire departments, parents, and the local MassHire Cape and Islands Workforce Board. They are all looking forward to supporting the initiative as it evolves.”

We are incredibly excited to partner with Mashpee Middle-High School and introduce the SimX system to secondary education students, educators, and community leaders. SimX is the world’s most advanced immersive sim platform, designed for all training levels and student types. Mashpee’s educational model is especially impressive as the future of medical simulation training moves from a singular, static experience to dynamic and immersive simulated patient encounters supplemented by first-hand professional involvement.