HealthVoyager
Boston Children’s Hospital and Klick Health
Keith Liu, Senior Vice President, Products & Innovation, Klick Health
kliu@klick.com
HealthVoyager is a pioneering medical education and patient experience platform that enables doctors to create customized Virtual Reality (VR) medical reports that take patients on 3D tours inside their bodies. It was unveiled in February 2018 as part of a collaborative innovation partnership between Klick Health and the Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The first iteration of the tool, HealthVoyager GI, has been designed for pediatric gastrointestinal patients and is poised to advance the standard of care and communication for young patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Each year, Boston Children’s performs thousands of endoscopic procedures. Of the 1.6 million Americans with inflammatory bowel disease, as many as 80,000 of them are children, according to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America.
While most gastroenterologists currently share endoscopy and colonoscopy findings with patients/families, their reports tend to be text-based, written in medical language, and may contain small, static thumbnail images, if any. HealthVoyager is an easy, fun, and interactive way to learn about and share complicated information like endoscopic findings. Pediatric patients can create their own avatars and take a customized virtual tour of their GI tracts. The platform provides these young patients with a “map” of their GI tract and the ability to explore their anatomy and visualize their doctor’s findings to help them educate themselves about their bodies and specific medical conditions.
The platform is currently the subject of a clinical study at Boston Children’s to validate its effect on patient and family understanding, engagement, and satisfaction. Klick and Boston Children’s are also exploring the expansion of the platform to other disease states, anatomical areas, and patient types.
