Doctor-patient relationships in the Second Life application

I recently attended some training on the clinical uses of Second Life. Second Life is a live, interactive, server-based software that enables users from all over the world to communicate and interact. It appears as a cartoon-like environment with 3-D features.

The University of California, Davis Health Informatics Program offered the training as a part of their Health Informatics course on The Internet and the Future of Patient Care. Instructors Bernadette Swanson and Peter Yellowlees provided several one hour instructional lessons and tours of the Second Life environment and how it could be utilized for patient care.

What struck me as most interesting was the sheer number of people that were live on the Second Life application. On the average, there were about 75,000 at any given time.

The instructors demonstrated how training of medical providers could be carried out online for tasks such as mass casualty incidents. In fact, the digital world was complete with a hangar, virtual patients and medical supplies. I found the experience exciting. Clearly, this online training will be vital for the training of groups of providers that cannot necessarily travel for training. One example would include rural EMT's that need biochemical disaster training but cannot leave their posts because of staffing issues.

Dr. Peter Yellowlees demonstrated other types of training in his Virtual Hallucinations project. In this part of Second Life, the public can tour the Virtual Hallucinations building and experience near to life visual and auditory hallucinations.

More importantly, I can see the roles of doctors and patients changing. Currently, physicians see patients in an office setting in what is called a face-to-face meeting. With the advanced technology of Second Life, doctors and patients could meet in the virtual world, interact, and complete relatively simple consultations.

Before the introduction of email, patients could speak to their doctor on the phone. Email can sometimes be informal and at times proves to make understanding context difficult. Now, with the Second Life application, patients can virtually interact with their physician without the need for traveling. Imaging going to the doctor without even having to get out of bed!

But will this create referral problems? Competition for patients is not currently a problem because of geographic locations of providers and patients. However, with the virtual environment patients could teleport to be evaluated by hundreds of providers. Will this change the doctor-patient relationship to that of eBay?

Let's hope that doctors will still be doctors and patients will still be patients. However, increasing access to providers is key. I look forward to working more with Second Life for the Future of Patient Care.

Jonathan S. Ware, MD