UK-based startup Oxford Medical Simulation has just raised about €2.4 million for its VR healthcare training. The company aims to meet the urgent need to train nurses and doctors more efficiently and help overcome the current staffing crisis in healthcare.
On a global level, healthcare systems are in crisis. A lack of funding, resources and staff shortages have created a storm that is having all-too-real implications on people’s lives – both worsening patient outcomes and giving healthcare staff a heavy burden and impossible challenges.
One way to overcome the current staffing crisis in healthcare is through more efficient training, but current solutions just aren’t able to train enough workers to keep up with demand. A July 2022 report by the UK’s parliamentary health and social care select committee found that the NHS is facing the “greatest workforce crisis in their history” and had nearly 100,000 advertised vacancies as of September 2021. Studies suggest that pressures resulting from these shortages will also compromise the competency of newly trained staff, worsening the situation.
Healthcare think tanks have suggested that training new staff, and investing in better training, is the key to overcoming the problem. That’s what Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) aims to achieve, and they’ve just got a cash injection to do it.
Funding details
The UK-based startup has just raised about €2.4 million in additional funding. The round included ACF Investors and angel investor Dr Nicolaus Henke, former chairman of Quantum Black and former head of McKinsey’s global healthcare practice.
Founded in 2017, the company simulates real-world clinical scenarios using VR – a safer, cheaper, and more efficient alternative. Conventional training centres deliver 200 simulations per month, whereas OMS can deliver up to 6,000 per month.
Michael Wallace, CEO and co-founder of OMS: “We see this funding as an opportunity to supercharge our growth and rapidly increase the number of healthcare professionals around the world who have access to our training. We want to enable nurses, doctors and allied healthcare professionals to do what they do with confidence and competence. We believe that by providing immersive, hyper-realistic training on a massive scale we can deliver better training to many more people and ultimately improve health outcomes for patients.”
Tackling the healthcare worker training gap
OMS’ platform uses immersive VR simulations with AI-controlled patients to train healthcare professionals using hundreds of clinical scenarios. These scenarios let learners train whenever they need to, practicing in virtual consultations, emergencies and procedures so they don’t risk their lives in the real world. As well as enhancing training quality, these simulations also allow many more healthcare professionals to be trained in a shorter space of time and at a fraction of the cost.
It is this efficiency that makes the platform one of the most promising solutions to the growing healthcare staffing crisis.
Tim Mills, Managing Partner at ACF Investors: “Oxford Medical Simulation is providing state-of-the-art, immersive training which uses emerging VR and AR technology to tackle the global healthcare worker shortage head-on. The team has already achieved some fantastic results – as seen in the company’s growth momentum and the quality of its customer base. It is, quite rightly, a demanding customer base, but they have shown the potential to ensure we all have access to highly trained healthcare professionals in the future.”
The startup’s current client base includes a wide range of NHS Trusts and universities as well as leading US universities, including John Hopkins University and Duke University, and several US health systems.
OMS will use this latest funding to rapidly expand its product offering across healthcare education and practice and to scale its US expansion.
Dr Nicolaus Henk: “Michael and his team are transforming the way healthcare training is delivered and experienced. Virtual simulation creates a better and more immersive training experience for learners, while at the same time freeing up very experienced senior nurses and doctors for important clinical and education leadership tasks. Not only do I see a broad market need for this technology in clinical education and training, but the opportunity to create a higher quality, more engaging training experience will be of enormous benefit to wider society”.
