University of Georgia College of Pharmacy

Immersive VR Training for Critical Care Pharmacy

University of Georgia College of Pharmacy

Immersive VR Training for Critical Care Pharmacy

UX Design

Game Design

UX Research

University of Georgia College of Pharmacy

Immersive VR Training for Critical Care Pharmacy

UX Design

Game Design

UX Research

Overview

RxReality is a desktop-based VR simulator designed to enhance critical care pharmacy education in partnership with our clients Dr. Anthony Hawkins and Dr. Trisha Branan at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy.

Our product recreates a realistic ICU environment using React and Three.js Fiber, enabling students to practice clinical decision-making in a low stakes and low cost space.

Our product focuses on:

Incorporating elements of emotional design, fostering a humanistic connection of user and digital patient.

Recreating the stress of ICU work through a digital space.

Allowing free navigation and exploration of the ICU, contrastive to didactic teaching methods.

Role

UX Designer & Researcher - Responsible for information architecture, preliminary research, and user testing.

Tools

Figma

Notion

Slack

Github

Three.js

Frameworks

Lean Project Management

Client Overview

University of Georgia College of Pharmacy: PHRM 5370: Critical Care Pharmacy’s Faculty Members

Anthony Hawkins, Pharm. D

Anthony Hawkins, Pharm. D

Anthony Hawkins, Pharm

Trisha Branan, Pharm. D

Trisha Branan, Pharm. D

Chris Bland, Pharm. D

Chris Bland, Pharm. D

Our clients, Dr. Hawkins, Dr. Branan, and Dr. Bland are professors of PHRM 5370: Critical Care Pharmacy, a 15-week elective course for P3 (3rd-year) Doctor of Pharmacy students at the University of Georgia.

They are seeking an immersive way to improve experiential learning in the classroom for critical care pharmacy students through the use of desktop virtual reality (DVR).

Initial Lean Canvas

As a part of our UX strategy, we created a quick lean canvas as an outline of what we anticipated certain key elements of our product to be. Doing this exercise before starting the design and development allows us to keep our customer base, unique value, and potential costs on the forefronts of our mind upon the products creation.

Problem 1. Difficulty in making clinical decisions in ambiguous situations 2. Lack of exposure to critical care decision making environments 3. Limited experience with high-stress, high-stakes clinical conversations

Solution 1. Realistic VR scenarios presenting ambiguous clinical situations 2. Simulated ICU environments with time pressure 3. Interactive dialogues mimicking conversations with healthcare team

Key Metrics 1. User satisfaction scores (from both students and faculty) 2. Student engagement (time spent in VR simulation) 3. Number of scenarios completed 4. User confidence scores (pre & post).

Value Proposition Immersive VR training for pharmacy students to practice critical clinical decision-making in high-stress scenarios, bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world practice.

Unfair Advantage 1. Interdisciplinary team combining content experts, instructional & UX designers, and software developers 2. Direct integration with pharmacy school curriculum 3. Access to a large pool of pharmacy students for user feedback and iterative design

Channels 1. Direct integration into course curriculum 2. In-class demonstrations and tutorials 3. University learning management system (LMS) 4. Faculty training sessions

Customer Primary: Pharmacy students and faculty in UGA CoP critical care elective Secondary (Aspirational): Other pharmacy schools, hospitals, and CE providers

Cost 1. Development costs (time of developers, instructional designers, and content experts) 2. Unity asset purchases from the Unity Asset Store 3. Web hosting costs (potentially upgrading to a more robust service) 4. Potential VR hardware costs (if not already available) 5. Ongoing maintenance and updates

Revenue Streams 1. Potential for grants or funding based on innovative educational technology 2. Future licensing to other pharmacy programs or other healthcare education programs (if that becomes a possibility) 3. Improved student outcomes leading to enhanced program reputation and potentially increased enrollment

As a result, we are able to outline the main purpose of our product, which is to allow students to gain experiential critical care pharmacy knowledge through a digital setting. By brainstorming how experiential knowledge can be measured, we propose 4 key metrics that will mark a successful product by the final delivery.

Another important takeaway from this exercise is being able to define our customer base as two pieced:

  1. Primary Users - students of the critical care elective.

  2. Our Client - College of Pharmacy faculty members.

User Research

As part of exploratory research, we interviewed several current students of the critical care elective. Across the board, we found that most students:

  1. Relied on mostly textbooks for studying due to a lack of virtual content-specific tools

  2. Have some experience in the hospital, but it is limited

  3. Integrate Cerner or Epic as their Electronic Health Record (EHR) in practice

Initial Lean Canvas

As a part of our UX strategy, we created a quick lean canvas as an outline of what we anticipated certain key elements of our product to be. Doing this exercise before starting the design and development allows us to keep our customer base, unique value, and potential costs on the forefronts of our mind upon the products creation.

As a result, we are able to outline the main purpose of our product, which is to allow students to gain experiential critical care pharmacy knowledge through a digital setting. By brainstorming how experiential knowledge can be measured, we propose 4 key metrics that will mark a successful product by the final delivery.

Another important takeaway from this exercise is being able to define our customer base as two pieced:

  1. Primary Users - students of the critical care elective.

  2. Our Client - College of Pharmacy faculty members.

Problem 1. Difficulty in making clinical decisions in ambiguous situations 2. Lack of exposure to critical care decision making environments 3. Limited experience with high-stress, high-stakes clinical conversations

Solution 1. Realistic VR scenarios presenting ambiguous clinical situations 2. Simulated ICU environments with time pressure 3. Interactive dialogues mimicking conversations with healthcare team

Key Metrics 1. User satisfaction scores (from both students and faculty) 2. Student engagement (time spent in VR simulation) 3. Number of scenarios completed 4. User confidence scores (pre & post).

Unfair Advantage 1. Interdisciplinary team combining content experts, instructional & UX designers, and software developers 2. Direct integration with pharmacy school curriculum 3. Access to a large pool of pharmacy students for user feedback and iterative design

Channels 1. Direct integration into course curriculum 2. In-class demonstrations and tutorials 3. University learning management system (LMS) 4. Faculty training sessions

Customer Primary: Pharmacy students and faculty in UGA CoP critical care elective Secondary (Aspirational): Other pharmacy schools, hospitals, and CE providers

Value Proposition Immersive VR training for pharmacy students to practice critical clinical decision-making in high-stress scenarios, bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world practice.

Cost 1. Development costs (time of developers, instructional designers, and content experts) 2. Unity asset purchases from the Unity Asset Store 3. Web hosting costs (potentially upgrading to a more robust service) 4. Potential VR hardware costs (if not already available) 5. Ongoing maintenance and updates

Revenue Streams 1. Potential for grants or funding based on innovative educational technology 2. Future licensing to other pharmacy programs or other healthcare education programs (if that becomes a possibility) 3. Improved student outcomes leading to enhanced program reputation and potentially increased enrollment

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis was conducted to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the current landscape of immersive pharmacy and medical education tools. This step was essential to identify gaps that our product could uniquely address and ensure our solution offers meaningful differentiation from existing products

To synthesize our interviewee’s needs, pain points, and demographics, I created Studious Sally to represent the typical user, highlighting how students often are working with a low pre-existing knowledge base about critical care pharmacy specifically.

Storyboarding Value Innovation

We generated 3 key features that the product will provide to users as a way to synthesize information about user needs, critical scenarios, and emotional triggers, ensuring the features align with the core objectives of the simulation.

  1. Freely navigating a physical environment, interacting with objects and staff.

  2. Incorporating emotional design that elicits empathetic, emotional response from the user regarding the patient.

  3. Creating tension at the decision-making level to simulate high-stress ICU scenarios.


Feature Comparison

Now that our key features are outlined and storyboarded, we created a feature comparison to other existing products. We intended to mostly search outside of the medical software space in order to draw information from a more diverse set, prompting us to incorporate new ideas that other medical software does not currently have.

Rapid Prototype

By creating a rapid prototype as a part of Lean methodology, we are able to quickly validate the key features and user flow of the simulation, ensuring alignment with user needs before committing to full development.

We used Figma to build a 2D model, as it allowed for faster iteration and testing compared to the time-intensive process of 3D development.


Rapid User Testing

We tested our rapid prototype on several different students currently enrolled in the critical care elective. We received varying types of feedback:

  1. Include interactions with patient family and friends to add to realism.

  2. Incorporate sound design (ex: heart monitor beeping).

  3. Keep the ability to see what the best outcome could have been.

  4. Add more close-up views of medical equipment in the room.

UX Research Protocol

As we move into Spring semester of 2025, we will conduct more extensive measures of user testing. To best prepare, we created a user experience research protocol to outline our future methods, metrics, and data analysis.

  • Roles

    • Interviewer (prompting users to complete tasks): Danielle

    • Notetaker (recording user reactions): Liam

    • Data Collector (distributing surveys, timing tasks): Katie

  • Sampling Methods

    • Participants will be recruited directly from the critical care pharmacy class, with a target of 8-12 participants out of the total 18 students, ensuring a representative sample of the population

  • Script

    • We created a script to conceptualize exactly what features and tasks we will be testing on the user. View the full script here.

  • Pre and Post Surveys

    • We will compare confidence to the task accuracy as well as the other metrics. Pre- and post-test survey responses will be analyzed through Likert scale ratings, with paired t-tests to evaluate shifts in confidence, medication error awareness, and decision-making speed. Semantic differential scales will be used to track changes in user perceptions of decision-making speed, technology comfort, and confidence calibration.

Development Progress

Starting with something two dimensional and more simple, we created a fully interactive version of an EMR (electronic medical record) that is embedded in our web product and will update accordingly as the patients condition changes. This EMR was created using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Next, we are working on adding 3D elements. The environment still is lacking shading and rendering, but the user is now able to move around the room and navigate towards the patient.

This project is still in development process and will be fully completed come April 2025!


Visit rxreality.com for live product updates.