Google Glass In Medical School Curriculum

There’s been a lot of talk about how to use Google Glass in healthcare. In fact, one of the best examples of this was the interview I did with Kyle Samani from Pristine about Google Glass in Healthcare. With the announcement that UC Irvine is integrating Google Glass and Pristine into its medical school curriculum, it’s great to see the talk about implementing Glass in various parts of healthcare finally becoming a reality. I’m excited for Kyle and his team.

The article says that UC Irvine is starting out with 10 pairs of Google Glass going out to 3rd and 4th years students in the operating rooms and ED. Then, in August 20-30 pairs will go to 1st and 2nd year students.

I think the education component of Google Glass in healthcare is really phenomenal. The first hand user perspective is really amazing and also the ability to communicate with a mentor or adviser in real time hands free is great as well. I remember showing Glass to my dentist friend and he immediately wanted to use them for the dental trainings he did in his organization.

The article does also mention a use of Google Glass I hadn’t heard before. They want to put Glass on patients in their “mock sessions.” I guess they’ve been using several cameras in the room already, but that doesn’t provide the up close and personal perspective of the patient. What a great idea. I do wonder if having glass on the patient will distract the trainee during the experience. I expect at first it will feel a bit odd, but they’ll get over it quickly.

I’ve heard some people ask if this implementation of Google Glass is a HIPAA violation. If it was a straight out of the box implementation of Google Glass, then there would be cause for concern. However, those people who are crying HIPAA have likely never talked with the people at Pristine. Pristine strips off all of the Google software and adds their own in order to be HIPAA compliant. I’m not saying that Pristine couldn’t run into HIPAA issues if they’re not careful, but that’s no different than any other health IT software company.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this implementation and how it evolves over time.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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