Charles River Analytics Inc, developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a contract to conduct a program of study for the US Army. In the Characters Allowing Rehearsal and Assessment of Communication in Team Emergency Response effort, or CHARACTER, Charles River is developing requirements for a serious game to train medical team skills and reduce medical errors in high-intensity trauma treatment. The 27-month contract is valued over $1.1 million. Charles River is partnering with Medstar Health Research Institute, HandHeld Speech, and Dr. John Broach of the University of Massachusetts Medical School on the CHARACTER effort.
Current programs for medical team training have been shown to increase patient safety and improve treatment outcomes. Unfortunately, the extensive time commitments required of these training programs have led to limited adoption by medical personnel, both in the DoD and in civilian healthcare.
“Medical team training needs to be more accessible,” said Dr. James Niehaus, Senior Scientist at Charles River. “With a small amount of practice, medical staff can significantly improve their teamwork skills and reduce adverse outcomes; this drives down healthcare costs and saves lives. Under CHARACTER, we are researching ways to develop games and simulations that efficiently bring team training to care providers.”
CHARACTER explores multiple fidelities of trauma treatment. On the top, MedStar Health’s Trauma Yellow presents a 3D interactive game with embodied teammates. On the bottom, Charles River Analytics’ STAT system presents a simplified 2D patient view.
CHARACTER is Charles River’s latest in a range of healthcare support and training efforts, which includes medical skills training, therapy and decision-support tools, and sensor and sensing technologies. Charles River will incorporate the methodology for annotated skill trees (MAST) framework into CHARACTER. MAST is a framework to model and evaluate tasks and procedures as part of training environment, which was developed in the LASTS effort. Charles River has also developed the TMT tourniquet training system, the PROMPTER training tool to improve battlefield first-aid skills, and the STAT tablet-based training system that presents a virtual patient in multiple trauma scenarios for efficient and effective learning, rehearsal, and assessment.
See other examples of our Healthcare Support and Training efforts.
This work is supported by the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under Contract No. W81XWH-16-C-0212. The views, opinions and/or findings contained herein are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation. In the conduct of research where humans are the subjects, the investigator(s) adhered to the policies regarding the protection of human subjects as prescribed by Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 45, Volume 1, Part 46; Title 32, Chapter 1, Part 219; and Title 21, Chapter 1, Part 50 (Protection of Human Subjects).
