Our ability to make something special out of nothing has certainly changed our lives, but is it the most important attribute in our arsenal? Well, not quite! The human skill that had the biggest role in weaving the modern era was our proficiency in pursuing constant progression. It’s one thing to have new tools to play with; however, if we are continuously failing to make the most of these tools, then the whole creative process becomes a tad futile. To avoid such a situation, we devote a huge amount of resources to just reworking the existing landscapes, and the benefits of it are well-testified by something like technology. When it first arrived on the scene, technology already had the label of a ‘generational creation’. After all, it wasn’t anything like the world had ever seen before. Nevertheless, the visionaries across the board knew that even a label of that sort wasn’t enough to protect it from inevitable stagnation. Hence, the efforts to make this creation even better were soon underway, and what came out of it ended up making that process look fairly worthwhile. Our bid to scale up technology led us towards ideas like artificial intelligence, IoT, data analytics, and many more that promised to give our lives a whole new dimension. The comprehensiveness of these ideas partnered with technology’s core versatility would go on to unlock opportunities that we didn’t even know had a space in real life, a pattern of thought that is evident in almost every by-product of technology. However, it made its latest appearance in the healthcare sector.
According to a study done by UC San Francisco in collaboration with S.O.L.V.E Health Tech and AppliedVR, virtual reality has the potential to be a viable addition to our current assortment of pain management approaches. If it really happens, it would mark another step in the expanding presence of VR across the medical sector. The technology in question is already being used for different purposes such as remote monitoring and telesurgery, but the experts claim that, as far as pain management is concerned, it will be a different journey. So far, one of the arguments against these findings is that they were conducted mainly in homogenous and relatively more advantaged environment; hence how it will adapt to serving diverse populations is still unknown. Apart from that, factors like integration into complex workflows, structural costs, and reimbursement concerns were repeatedly brought up as possible roadblocks during a slew of interviews that aided the research.
“It will require collaboration across industries to overcome the hurdles that stand in the way of wider adoption, including commitments from payers for more reimbursement and adapted content that tailors to the needs of diverse populations,” said Dr. Urmimala Sarkar, lead author on the study, UCSF professor of medicine and cofounder of S.O.L.V.E. Health Tech.
