Life Sciences

The Virtual Patient

The metaverse—a digital space that links the virtual and physical worlds—is coming. It enables people to gather and interact virtually with the sense that they are all in the same place. Many healthcare providers have already discovered its potential, and are generating considerable sales in it. Porsche Consulting The Magazine spoke with three experts about the opportunities and risks in the new healthcare metaverse.

03/2023

The metaverse has entered the OR: augmented reality systems can help doctors better prepare for operations and perform them with greater precision. Brainlab/Magic Leap/Getty Images/Alvarez

The term “meta­verse” is attrib­uted to sci­ence fic­tion writer Neal Stephen­son. In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, the pro­tag­o­nists have adven­tures not only in the ana­logue world but also as avatars in a dig­i­tal space called the meta­verse. It’s noth­ing new for thinkers and doers to be influ­enced by authors of sci­ence fic­tion. In fact, that stands to rea­son. “Every­thing that’s still fic­tion in one moment can become real­i­ty in the next,” says Dr. Martha Böck­en­feld, Dean and Part­ner at Zurich’s Meta­verse Acad­e­my, in an inter­view with Porsche Con­sult­ing The Magazine.

But what will the health­care meta­verse be like in the future? Will it take the form of a “dig­i­tal vil­lage,” in the words of Adam Grün­der, an advi­sor for the BPV Group? That is, will it sim­ply be a plat­form where all health­care providers are rep­re­sent­ed? And where patients can find con­tacts and solu­tions for all their health­care needs?

Accord­ing to Grün­der, it will take at least a decade before a sce­nario of that type becomes a reality—and his fore­cast could well be on the opti­mistic side. It also rais­es the ques­tion of who will con­trol the plat­form. “As far as Ger­man con­sumers are con­cerned, it’s sure­ly bet­ter to have sen­si­tive health­care data stored on servers in their own coun­try than with inter­na­tion­al tech com­pa­nies,” he notes. Peo­ple in coun­tries with more secure and per­haps also more tech-friend­ly data pro­tec­tion frame­works than Ger­many might well have sim­i­lar ideas. If so, could this pre­clude an inter­na­tion­al solu­tion for a com­pre­hen­sive plat­form? In Böckenfeld’s opin­ion the inter­na­tion­al idea remains viable, as long as a neu­tral orga­ni­za­tion instead of a com­pa­ny is charged with con­trol­ling the data platform.

For Josef Bartl, data pro­tec­tion is of cru­cial impor­tance, but dis­cus­sion about who will con­trol this type of plat­form is pre­ma­ture. Vice Pres­i­dent for Cor­po­rate Strat­e­gy and M&A at Brain­lab, Bartl thinks an “all-encom­pass­ing par­al­lel world in the health­care sec­tor” sim­ply doesn’t make sense for the near future. In his view, the health­care meta­verse is defined not by a large and shared space but rather by the sup­port for spe­cif­ic prob­lems that comes from merg­ing the ana­logue world with data. “That process opens up new oppor­tu­ni­ties,” he says. “New ways to con­sume infor­ma­tion, inter­act with data mod­els, and col­lab­o­rate with other peo­ple in a data-sup­port­ed setting.”

In a virtual hospital doctors have everything in view. They can access digital case files and MRI results and hold video calls with international experts. Tech networks are expected to improve diagnostic accuracy. And treatments can be tailored more easily to individual patients.Doob
The metaverse connects physicians around the world. Here they meet in a virtual space with a 3D model to discuss the best approach.Brainlab
Virtual training modules let individual surgeons and OR teams practice difficult procedures and try out alternatives before an actual operation.Osso VR
A doctor uses a virtual 3D model to explain a surgical procedure to a patient. Brainlab
Brainlab’s Mixed Reality Viewers let medical personnel access 3D models of their patients at any time, and plan and perform operations more effectively. Brainlab

Expertise is coming to patients—worldwide

These types of oppor­tu­ni­ties are what need to be more sharply delin­eat­ed for the health­care meta­verse to make its final break­through, says Alexan­der Nathaus, Part­ner for Life Sci­ence at the Porsche Con­sult­ing man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy. “The meta­verse will only be able to devel­op its full poten­tial when patients under­stand the con­crete ben­e­fits on offer from the new dig­i­tal world of healthcare.”

Nathaus has no doubts about the mag­ni­tude of poten­tial here. “The leap in accep­tance for telemed­i­cine since the COVID cri­sis makes it abun­dant­ly clear that you don’t always have to visit doc­tors in the ana­logue world,” he observes. Often it can be more con­ve­nient to seek med­ical advice in vir­tu­al spaces. But not only that: “Vir­tu­al con­sul­ta­tions can also make more sense if experts with rel­e­vant knowl­edge about a given med­ical issue are not avail­able in your area.” Treat­ment can be guid­ed by inter­na­tion­al experts and admin­is­tered by local partners.

Nathaus points to an entire range of appli­ca­tions that are already shap­ing every­day health­care in the meta­verse. These include col­lab­o­ra­tive projects by physi­cians in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, enhanced prepa­ra­tions for oper­a­tions, and the use of dig­i­tal twins for patient con­sul­ta­tions and med­ical train­ing. “The younger gen­er­a­tion in par­tic­u­lar is already famil­iar with the meta­verse, so this vir­tu­al space will be play­ing an ever greater role in med­ical set­tings as well.”

Invest­ments in the health­care meta­verse should nev­er­the­less be care­ful­ly con­sid­ered. “Com­pa­nies seek­ing suc­cess in this field should start by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ana­lyz­ing their oppor­tu­ni­ties and assess­ing their spe­cif­ic risks, and then move on to strate­gic step-by-step plan­ning,” says Nathaus. Ini­tial analy­ses should devote spe­cial atten­tion to two ques­tions: Can the company’s spe­cif­ic prod­ucts and ser­vices gen­er­ate added value in the dig­i­tal health­care sec­tor? And which con­di­tions need to be met—alone or with partners—in order to steer the company’s busi­ness model into this new channel?

If com­pa­nies can suc­ceed in estab­lish­ing use­ful solu­tions in the meta­verse, they them­selves will cer­tain­ly benefit—and as so often is the case in the health­care sec­tor, so too will patients.


Adam Gründer: “A shared platform will take another decade”

Deutsche Telekom/Marc-Steffen Unger

Adam Grün­der joined the BPV Group in Novem­ber 2022 as Glob­al Inter­na­tion­al Advi­sor for Busi­ness Devel­op­ment. Head­quar­tered in the west­ern Ger­man coun­ty seat of Unna, BPV spe­cial­izes in mobile work­places, includ­ing solu­tions in vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty. He is also CEO of 10xD, an agency that devel­ops events and other for­mats for the health­care sec­tor. Before com­ing to BPV, Grün­der was Lead Inno­va­tion Man­ag­er at T‑Systems with a focus on meta­verse, cloud, and IT solu­tions for health­care. This inter­view was held when he was still at T‑Systems.

Adam Gründer is already a regular visitor to the healthcare metaverse—in the form of his avatar or digital persona. In his view, however, a long-term perspective is needed for the new digital space to sharpen its contours. “With an eye to the future, the best way to imagine the healthcare metaverse is as a village,” he says. When people enter this digital village—all in the form of their avatars—they have a number of different options. “Even if it’s just one platform, they can seek out very different parts of it to have medical applications or to get information.” A crucial precondition for the new digital world: “This virtual forum will have to be open to all participants in the healthcare market.”

Pre­cise­ly this open­ness is what gives Gründer’s vision its bold qual­i­ty, because the health­care meta­verse cur­rent­ly resem­bles a smor­gas­bord of apps from dif­fer­ent providers that are not con­nect­ed with each other. “That’s why it’ll take at least a decade before we see a shared plat­form,” he pre­dicts. But until that hap­pens, busi­ness can still be con­duct­ed suc­cess­ful­ly in the par­al­lel uni­vers­es of the world today.

New healthcare opportunities

Togeth­er with Doob, a Ger­man 3D spe­cial­ist that went through T‑Systems’ accel­er­a­tor pro­gram, Grün­der and his col­leagues have already built numer­ous meta­vers­es for com­pa­nies in the health­care sec­tor. “We cre­ate walk-in spaces for our clients in the vir­tu­al world,” he says. “They’re either com­plete­ly new or some type of repli­ca of hos­pi­tals or offices.” Users can enter them only as their avatars, of course. To get an avatar, they have a scan made of their face and place it on one of a range of dif­fer­ent bod­ies on offer. If they do not want a ready-made selec­tion, they can opt for Doob’s full-body scan. Rough­ly the size of a tele­phone booth, the scan­ner gen­er­ates a dig­i­tal twin of the per­son in around 30 sec­onds. The Ger­man nation­al soc­cer team, for exam­ple, has already used the Doob scan­ner for pur­pos­es of its own.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, how­ev­er, the peo­ple who have them­selves scanned by Doob are health­care experts. They recent­ly includ­ed con­sul­tants from Barmer Ersatzkasse, one of Germany’s major health insur­ance com­pa­nies, for which T‑Systems and Doob have cre­at­ed vir­tu­al sales spaces. “Many health insur­ance com­pa­nies are slow­ly los­ing touch with the gen­er­a­tion below around 25 years of age,” notes Grün­der in sketch­ing their predica­ment. Barmer wants to win them back with the help of its branch office in the meta­verse. “It makes Barmer stand out,” he says, “and offers poten­tial young cus­tomers an intrigu­ing and appeal­ing alter­na­tive to con­ven­tion­al insur­ance consultations.”

Wheel­chairs, too, have gone through Doob’s scan­ner. “Any­one who needs a wheel­chair sets off on an odyssey to a host of dif­fer­ent providers,” explains Grün­der. “But now, they and their advi­sors can gen­er­ate avatars and meet in a vir­tu­al show­room to choose a suit­able model togeth­er.” All kinds of dif­fer­ent “spaces” can be trans­ferred to the vir­tu­al realm. Togeth­er with Essen Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­tre (UME), Grün­der and his col­leagues have sent an entire mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI) sys­tem into the 3D world of the meta­verse. UME’s aim was to train its employ­ees. “With hos­pi­tal per­son­nel no longer occu­py­ing the cost-inten­sive high-tech sys­tem for their train­ing, the vir­tu­al MRI sys­tem pays off in about a week already,” he says. In any event, Grün­der sees edu­ca­tion and train­ing for doc­tors and other health­care pro­fes­sion­als as key fields of activ­i­ty that can be shift­ed to the meta­verse with an eye to cost and user benefits.

Long road to the meta-village

These are the kinds of indi­vid­ual appli­ca­tions cur­rent­ly avail­able in the health­care meta­verse, says Grün­der. In order to trans­form them into his vision of a shared meta-vil­lage acces­si­ble to every­one, pol­i­cy­mak­ers first have to pre­pare the ground. “If a plat­form of this type is to arise in Europe, poten­tial providers will need greater access rights to health­care data,” he says. If the plat­form is locat­ed in Ger­many, patients could well give it the ben­e­fit of the doubt. “As far as Ger­man con­sumers are con­cerned, it’s sure­ly bet­ter to have sen­si­tive health­care data stored on servers in their own coun­try than with inter­na­tion­al tech companies.”

Pol­i­cy­mak­ers are not the only play­ers need­ed to enable a break­through for the meta­verse. “The biggest prob­lem in my opin­ion right now are the patients,” says Grün­der. In fact, very few of them think of the meta­verse when they have health prob­lems or need med­ical advice. And even then, some would ask why they should go online if they need an appen­dix removed in real life. “We there­fore have to do a lot more explain­ing of what the meta­verse actu­al­ly is and how each of us can ben­e­fit from using it.”

Headsets for virtual consulting rooms

Not least of all, Grün­der con­sid­ers the req­ui­site equip­ment to pose a hur­dle for large groups of poten­tial users. Devices cur­rent­ly on the mar­ket are expen­sive, not always easy to oper­ate, and in some coun­tries not avail­able at all. Busi­ness set­tings are there­fore prime can­di­dates for the use of VR head­sets, he notes, espe­cial­ly for online events and train­ing. And, in fact, some companies—not least of all the BPV Group—have already entered this new world and are han­dling their entire hir­ing process and life-cycle man­age­ment via VR or AR systems.

Grün­der is con­vinced that the head­set prob­lem will grad­u­al­ly resolve itself. As time goes by, the acces­si­bil­i­ty bot­tle­neck will widen and enough acces­sories will go onto the mar­ket. As he con­cludes, “Any­one who starts using the devices for per­son­al reasons—even if that’s only for com­put­er games—will later take their head­sets into the offices and vir­tu­al con­sult­ing rooms of the health­care metaverse.”


Martha Böckenfeld: “An international organization should create a platform for everyone”

privat

Dr. Martha Böck­en­feld is a meta­verse pro­po­nent who is Dean and Part­ner at the Meta­verse Acad­e­my in Zurich, Switzer­land. She teach­es and advis­es in the fields of inno­va­tion man­age­ment, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, Web3, and blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. One of the Top 100 Women of the Future and the World’s Top 200 Busi­ness & Tech­nol­o­gy Inno­va­tors, she is also active in var­i­ous net­works to pro­mote pro­fes­sion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for women. Over the course of her 20-year career in inter­na­tion­al finance, Böck­en­feld has been a board mem­ber for the Win­terthur Group, CEO of Klein­wort Ben­son, super­vi­so­ry board mem­ber for Uni­cred­it, and a mem­ber of UBS Schweiz’s board in charge of dig­i­tal plat­forms and marketplaces.

Dr. Martha Böckenfeld’s interest in what would later be called the “metaverse” was piqued at the very latest upon donning a virtual reality headset for the first time in London in 2015. This initial virtual experience was especially formative because it dovetailed with her professional focus at the time, namely customer expectations. “What I realized right away was that this new technology would end up changing customer expectations as much as Netflix and Amazon had done previously.” She therefore resolved to learn more about it.

Science fiction becomes reality

Böck­en­feld now knows a good deal more about the “health­verse,” as she calls it. That includes know­ing that a com­pre­hen­sive health­verse is far off in the future. “But every­thing that is still fic­tion in one moment can become real­i­ty in the next,” she says. And adds, “Tech­nol­o­gy is devel­op­ing expo­nen­tial­ly these days.” In fact, much of what might have been dis­missed as sci­ence fic­tion sev­er­al years ago is now pos­si­ble thanks to VR tech­nol­o­gy. In August 2022, Brazil­ian sur­geons suc­ceed­ed in sep­a­rat­ing a pair of con­joined twins in a 27-hour oper­a­tion. Vir­tu­al repli­cas of the twins had pre­vi­ous­ly been made from CT and MRI scans, and they enabled sur­geons to prac­tice the unusu­al pro­ce­dure over a peri­od of months in a near-real­is­tic set­ting. The team was sup­port­ed by numer­ous inter­na­tion­al experts who could enter the vir­tu­al space from any­where in the world. Noor ul Owase Jee­lani, one of the sur­geons, was so amazed by the VR tech­nol­o­gy that he described it in a post-oper­a­tion inter­view with the BBC as “man-on-Mars stuff.”

Connection instead of separation

Exam­ples like this show the poten­tial the vir­tu­al world offers for health­care in par­tic­u­lar. It tran­scends spa­tial and tem­po­ral lim­its and brings experts togeth­er to devel­op solu­tions that ben­e­fit patients. All of that is already real­i­ty. But Böck­en­feld crit­i­cizes the fact that the health­verse cur­rent­ly con­sists pri­mar­i­ly of a large num­ber of indi­vid­ual appli­ca­tions that are not con­nect­ed with each other. “What’s miss­ing is interoperability—the health­care ecosys­tem as a whole is not interconnected.”

Grant­ed, inter­na­tion­al tech com­pa­nies would love to cre­ate a plat­form to host all the appli­ca­tions and vir­tu­al real­i­ty solu­tions. But in Böckenfeld’s view, that would be only the sec­ond-best option. “It would be bet­ter to entrust an inde­pen­dent glob­al orga­ni­za­tion with pro­vid­ing the healthverse’s dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture to all the play­ers,” she says. Even though that in itself wouldn’t solve all the prob­lems fac­ing an all-encom­pass­ing “health­care metaverse.”

Data quality determines value

Like many inno­v­a­tive projects in the health­care sec­tor, the glob­al health­verse would also be pow­ered to a high degree by data. “That’s prob­lem­at­ic because each coun­try has dif­fer­ent rules on how to han­dle data,” she explains. Not only that—each patient’s data are gen­er­al­ly dis­trib­uted across numer­ous sites. They are stored with dif­fer­ent doc­tors, at hos­pi­tals or med­ical cen­ters, and on smart­phones and wear­ables. “In the future, how­ev­er, every user will have to see them­selves as the owner of their data, and con­sol­i­date them in a sin­gle place.”

That type of place could be a “dig­i­tal wal­let,” says Böck­en­feld. The data gath­ered there would reflect the com­plete life cycle of the respec­tive owner. It would rep­re­sent the essence of what Böck­en­feld calls their dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty. “The iden­ti­ty could be used to cre­ate a dig­i­tal twin, for exam­ple, which in turn can help pre­dict what would be ben­e­fi­cial in a spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion or per­haps harm­ful.” These data are what would make it mean­ing­ful to enter the glob­al health­verse in the form of one’s avatar. Not least of all, the data are what the health­care apps need in order to cre­ate value for their patients.


Josef Bartl: “The metaverse has already arrived in clinical practice”

Alexander Beck

Josef Bartl is the head of Cor­po­rate Strat­e­gy and M&A at Brain­lab, a lead­ing provider of dig­i­tal med­ical tech­nol­o­gy based in the south­ern Ger­man city of Munich. He is respon­si­ble for strate­gic projects and trans­ac­tions that fur­ther advance the company’s lead­ing role in data-dri­ven health­care. Under his lead­er­ship Brain­lab acquired the Chica­go-based video game spe­cial­ist Level Ex in 2020, which could sig­nif­i­cant­ly strength­en his company’s med­ical train­ing port­fo­lio. Before join­ing Brain­lab, Bartl worked as an M&A advi­sor. He stud­ied eco­nom­ics at Lud­wig-Max­i­m­il­ians-Uni­ver­sität (LMU) in Munich.

Brainlab might be one of the German technology corporations that has been shaping the healthcare metaverse in practice right from the start. “If you look at what metaverse applications consist of today, we essentially were active in this field well before the term came into use,” observes Josef Bartl, Vice President Corporate Strategy and M&A at Brainlab.

Bartl notes that the term “meta­verse” has mul­ti­ple lay­ers of mean­ing. He him­self views it pri­mar­i­ly as a merg­ing of the real world with data. “That process yields new and impres­sive forms of inter­ac­tive data visu­al­iza­tions ‚” he says, “which can be used as the foun­da­tion for col­lab­o­ra­tion and deci­sion-mak­ing.” Given the high impor­tance Bartl ascribes to the meta­verse, it’s no won­der the main thing he wants from it is more. ”The more data we have, the bet­ter the apps we can devel­op.” And the more data patients bring to their treat­ments, the more effec­tive­ly the apps can be put into prac­tice. In a sense, he says, the meta­verse is like “a space to be filled with data.”

But Bartl con­trasts this nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of the meta­verse with a broad­er one, name­ly the vision of an all-encom­pass­ing par­al­lel dig­i­tal world. Such visions are found large­ly in the enter­tain­ment world, he notes. The ques­tions there are along the lines of whether it’s pos­si­ble to attend con­certs vir­tu­al­ly, or embark on vir­tu­al jour­neys. The focus is on shared expe­ri­ences in a vir­tu­al space. In a health­care con­text, how­ev­er, the idea of an all-encom­pass­ing meta­verse makes no sense. “In a world with spe­cif­ic health-relat­ed prob­lems, meta­verse appli­ca­tions need to focus in tar­get­ed form on par­tic­u­lar ill­ness­es or treat­ment meth­ods,” he explains. “And I don’t think that’s going to change in the near future.”

Patients and their models

Brain­lab has shown with numer­ous apps that com­mer­cial suc­cess is pos­si­ble with­in the nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of the meta­verse. The Munich-based com­pa­ny spe­cial­izes in tech­nolo­gies designed to improve the work involved in sur­gi­cal oper­a­tions. One exam­ple would be the Vir­tu­al Tech­ni­cal Guides from its sub­sidiary Level Ex. The under­ly­ing app pro­vides a three-dimen­sion­al inter­ac­tive model of the per­son to be oper­at­ed on. By also show­ing the instru­ments that can be used, it helps OR per­son­nel pre­pare for the pro­ce­dure. The tech­nol­o­gy is soon expect­ed to be used dur­ing the surgery itself, with 3D model visu­al­iza­tions of the next steps. But do these prop­er­ties actu­al­ly make it a meta­verse app? With­out a doubt, says Bartl. “Users inter­act in real time with a 3D model, and the app allows par­al­lel access by exter­nal spe­cial­ists.” Inter­ac­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion: there they are again—Bartl’s two defin­ing cri­te­ria for the metaverse.

Meta­verse appli­ca­tions can also be help­ful in ear­li­er stages of prepa­ra­tion for surgery, for exam­ple in radi­ol­o­gy. Brain­lab is devel­op­ing 3D anatom­i­cal mod­els from MRI and CT scans. With the help of holo­grams viewed in aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) head­sets, doc­tors can show patients how oper­a­tions will pro­ceed in real­is­tic detail. “A deep­er level of under­stand­ing low­ers patient anx­i­ety,” says Bartl in explain­ing the ben­e­fits for all con­cerned. “It pro­motes accep­tance and instills con­fi­dence in the rec­om­mend­ed procedure.”

Once gen­er­at­ed, the 3D model can also be used later dur­ing the oper­a­tion itself. Crit­i­cal struc­tures requir­ing spe­cial atten­tion, such as neur­al path­ways, can be super­im­posed in the eye­pieces of OR micro­scopes. Estab­lished prac­tice since the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, this process has noth­ing to do with the meta­verse, how­ev­er. Bartl notes it is used by thou­sands of clients. Brain­lab is cur­rent­ly work­ing on the abil­i­ty to take the entire anatom­i­cal holo­gram into the OR—ideally enriched with even more use­ful data.

Thinking of medical schools

Despite the com­pre­hen­sive imag­ing options for 3D mod­els and the dif­fer­ent ways of inter­act­ing with them, not all experts are open to these types of solu­tions. “Many doc­tors con­tin­ue to work with 2D cross-sec­tion­al images and use them as the bases for their deci­sions,” says Bartl. A real break­through for the meta­verse as defined by Brain­lab would there­fore be to have three-dimen­sion­al under­stand­ing inte­grat­ed into the train­ing at med­ical schools. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly that’s only rarely the case. Usu­al­ly the res­i­dents only encounter 3D rep­re­sen­ta­tions of patient imag­ing data very late in their clin­i­cal train­ing, often in fact with our apps.”

Bartl hopes that will change in the near future and that meta­verse appli­ca­tions will soon be shap­ing med­ical train­ing as well. In his view, this type of inte­gra­tion would not only improve uni­ver­si­ty med­ical edu­ca­tion but also democ­ra­tize it. “Meta­verse apps will make the rel­e­vant exper­tise avail­able every­where, not only to stu­dents at spe­cial­ized and often expen­sive insti­tu­tions,” he pre­dicts. This is a vision that would improve the chances of suc­cess­ful treat­ment for a great num­ber of patients—regardless of what hap­pens with the all-encom­pass­ing ver­sion of a meta­verse plat­form for everyone.


How the metaverse improves treatment

  • Bringing experts together: Medical personnel from around the world can consult in digital spaces and provide virtual support for operations.
  • Preparing for operations: Hospital personnel can use holograms of their patients’ anatomy to prepare in targeted form for procedures.
  • Assisting operations: Augmented reality headsets can provide surgeons with important additional information as well as step-by-step instructions if desired.
  • Training: Medical personnel can receive concrete training on digital twins of CT or MRI equipment, for example, thereby freeing these high-cost and heavily booked systems for patient use. Virtual training is already being done with metaverse apps.
  • Patient consultations: Medical personnel can use virtual reality headsets and 3D models to explain diseases and treatments more effectively to their patients.
  • New treatments: Data collected from smartphones and wearables can enable entirely new treatments to be developed. Whether and where this succeeds will depend not least of all on data protection-related restrictions in individual countries.
  • Improving outreach: A metaverse presence and avatars can improve outreach especially to younger target groups and interest them in forward-looking treatments because digital solutions are already more aligned with their lived realities.
  • Remote monitoring: Healthcare personnel can use metaverse apps to continuously monitor their patients’ conditions—even if the latter are in isolated or underserved locations.
  • Virtual reality treatments: Therapy sessions in virtual spaces are already taking place for psychological conditions, including anxiety and post-traumatic stress.
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