Updated 5:42 p.m.
Simbionix USA Corp. has gone mobile with its surgery simulation education.
The Medical Education Division of Simbionix has launched its first mobile product: an application for Apple Inc.’s iPhone, iPod and iPad technologies that pushes the division’s online courses for the medical and health care industries to the palm of your hand.
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Simbionix is introducing its first app at the 12th World Congress of Endoscopic Surgery in National Harbor, Md., today through Saturday.
“Smartphones are rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for physicians,” said Paul Jensen, general manager of the company’s education division, in a written statement. “The addition of mobile-based training gives medical device manufacturers an efficient way to communicate the safe and effective use of surgical devices.”
The market for medical applications is exploding. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. doctors own smartphones, according to Manhattan Research, a pharmaceutical and health care market research and advisory firm in New York. Manhattan Research expects that penetration rate to be 81 percent in two years.
“By 2012, all physicians will walk around with a stethoscope and a smart mobile device, and there will be very few professional activities that physicians won’t be doing on their handhelds,” said Monique Levy, senior director of research at the New York firm.
The Simbionix surgical training app combines high-fidelity 3D animations, surgical interactions and assessments to educate medical professionals and measure their understanding. Simbionix is developing applications for other mobile platforms, including Blackberry and Android, Jensen said in a telephone interview from the Maryland endoscopy congress.
Based in Cleveland, Simbionix first became known for its surgical procedure simulators–systems that use computer screens and software attached to medical instruments to train surgeons and other medical professionals how to do minimally invasive procedures like examine a lung with an endoscope, and implant a brain stent or heart pacemaker. Most of the systems go by the name Mentor and are made by a contract manufacturer in Eastlake, Ohio.
In 2006, Simbionix acquired eTrinsic Inc., a Louisville, Colo., company that developed online medical education and assessment tools, for undisclosed terms. eTrinsic, which has since relocated to Denver, had worked with Simbionix for about a year before the companies merged their “capabilities, technologies and client relationships,” said Simbionix President Ran Bronstein in a statement about the acquisition.
By getting together, the companies “could more quickly develop and deliver a market-changing solution,” Bronstein said. “While both companies have been leaders in the medical education and training market for eight years, the market is still in its infancy in terms of both capabilities and revenue growth. We intend to increase our pace of innovation to develop an advanced and comprehensive solution for physician and sales force education and training.”
In 2008, the eLearning division released Version 6.0 of its Learning Management System, which delivers online medical education modules to tens of thousands of users. The new version refined modules for enhanced scalability, greater speed and superior performance, Simbionix said, at the time.
In September, Simbionix hired Jensen, a former IT executive, to take charge of MentorLearn, the company’s learning management system that was launched in 2009 to expand training and education beyond Simbionix’s core simulation technologies.
Jensen is helping to integrate the learning management system with his company’s simulation technologies. He eventually hopes to network Simbionix simulators with the learning management system. With the addition of the mobile application, users would be able to learn through computers, smart phones and simulators.
“That starts to create some exciting opportunities,” Jensen said. For instance, a mentor in Washington, D.C., could use the merging technologies to remotely guide the education of a physician in Cleveland.
“That’s part of the power of this,” he said. “It’s not just a cool technology, it starts to change the nature of place and time for these training activities.”
