Making surgical training more inclusive, one video frame at a time

Inside a U.K.-based studio, animators and former filmmakers in the Medtronic Digital Technologies business unit create virtual, lifelike medical education experiences for surgeons globally.

Their approach to this work is high-tech, but for a while, it also reflected a problem as old as medical education itself: the depictions of patients and clinicians lacked diversity - in race, body type, age, and health.

Animators in the Digital Surgery Studio

For the Medtronic Digital Technologies Studio team, it became a priority to increase diversity, especially in our interactive Touch Surgery app, which clinicians use to learn the steps, instruments, and anatomy involved in surgical procedures.

Lack of diversity in patient representation - whether they appear in an app or on paper - affects how doctors learn and how patients feel.

"If you want people to come back to the app, the full training experience needs to reflect what surgeons see in the operating room," said Vanessa Thompson, a Media Content Manager on the studio team. "Our customers understand there's currently a lot of training education out there that is very one-sided."

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Partnering with our employees

The Digital Technologies Studio took a thoughtful approach to broadening the patients represented in the app.

"We didn't want to design random patients and tick a box," Thompson said. "We wanted to check, is this patient right for this procedure?"

Considerations included more than skin tone. For instance, the team didn't want to depict a healthy-looking young patient if a surgeon was more likely to encounter a less-healthy patient, Thompson said.

The studio worked with Medtronic Employee Resource Groups to generate some new patient avatars for the app - and then validate the patients once created.

"Imagine an artist creating a painting. The artist may introduce their own biases into their work, so it's important to have real people to reference and validate," Thompson said.

Thompson said what she's most proud of is that at no point has anyone questioned why this work is being done. Instead, they're asking how they can help. The studio team is also considering expanding its work beyond medical education.

"The nature of unconscious bias means it will happen to all of us over and over. It's more about making sure we have the right checks and discussions in place to keep on track, and it will always be an ongoing effort that shouldn't stop."

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