Promoting patient‐centered‐care through a virtual reality medical school curriculum focused on dementia and end‐of‐life in the COVID Era

Background The COVID pandemic has brought death and dying to the forefront, contributing to the already high levels of physician burnout. Furthermore, there is a negative correlation between physician burnout and empathy. Due to time constraints of clinical rotations in traditional medical education, there are often shortcomings in students’ understanding of how to best manage and communicate with chronically or terminally ill patients. This study implements a distributive model of a virtual reality (VR)‐based curriculum, utilizing vignettes that portray a Latinx woman, Beatriz, with Alzheimer’s disease, and a veteran, Clay, with cancer transitioning to hospice from a first‐person perspective. Method Medical and premedical students in Chicago were recruited (N = 12, 75% female, 58% White, 58% M2) and engaged in a self‐directed VR‐based curriculum, including Embodied Labs modules and corresponding lectures from expert physicians. Lecture content time was 2 hours 40 minutes and VR module time was 35 minutes, which students completed at their own pace prior to a Zoom group discussion. Participants completed a series of pre‐ and post‐surveys. Result Preliminary qualitative analysis reveals participant‐perceived increased competencies in the following themes: medical knowledge and preparedness (100%), compassion and empathy (67%), communication and patience (50%), emotional connection and advocacy (50%), and family values and comfort (42%) after program completion. Moreover, 11/12 participant reflections either directly stated the value of this experience for their professional development or explicitly highlighted its utility within medical school curricula. Additional qualitative content analyses and quantitative statistics on the changes in pre‐ and post‐survey measures are forthcoming. Conclusion Burnout and reduced patient‐centered‐care have been identified as barriers to empathic delivery of care in the COVID era. Utilizing VR to develop a medical curriculum fosters increased compassion and empathy in the context of dementia and end‐of‐life care. This multi‐dimensional curriculum can be scaled and implemented virtually to mitigate the impact of burnout on empathy in trainees caring for patients during the pandemic. Future aims include formally integrating this model into a medical curriculum, targeting students early in their career before they are overwhelmed with burnout, and broadening content to include trainees from diverse medical professional progr