Patient Centered Virtual Reality: An Opportunity To Improve The Quality Of Patient's Experience

The concept of Patient Centered Medicine today constitutes a crucial dimension of the health care system’s mission. The importance of overcoming a disease-centered approach is widely acknowledged, making essential for health practitioners and organizations to involve patients in their care plans, to explore patients’ preferences and concerns and to consider the patient as a whole person, with his/her emotional needs and life issues. In fact, there is evidence that these aspects are crucial for ensuring the quality and effectiveness of the process of care. It is also widely accepted that technologies can have a role in enabling a patient centered approach. We argue that Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are particularly suitable to help health care practitioners and organizations in advancing toward patient centeredness. Basing on the literature on VR in health care settings, we review VR tools that aim to support patients in dealing with their illness experience instead than addressing a specific pathology. We describe (1) pain management methods and (2) rehabilitation techniques as therapeutic interventions that share the potentiality of enabling a patient centered approach. We then consider the use of virtual environments in educational intervention directed to care providers, and specifically to train health professionals in patient-centered relational and communicational competences. In conclusion, we highlight new directions and implications for future uses of virtual reality in health care settings. Specifically, we elaborate on the parallelism between the concept of patient centeredness and the usercentered approaches in the design of technologies, suggesting innovative strategies to involve patients and health practitioners in the design of the future VR tools.