VR training provider aims to solve healthcare staffing crisis via £2.1m funding

Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS), a provider of “highly realistic” virtual reality healthcare training, has raised a further £2.1m in a funding round.

The funding round included ACF Investors and angel investor Dr Nicolaus Henke, former chairman of Quantum Black and former head of McKinsey’s global healthcare practice.

OMS is a software platform that uses VR simulations with AI-controlled patients to train healthcare professionals using hundreds of clinical scenarios. These scenarios let learners train whenever they need to, practising in virtual consultations, emergencies and procedures so they don’t risk lives in the real world.

As well as enhancing training quality, these simulations also allow more healthcare professionals to be trained in a shorter space of time: a conventional training centre will deliver around 200 simulations per month, whereas OMS recently delivered 6,000 sessions per month in one site alone, at a fraction of the cost.

Dr Jack Pottle, chief medical officer and co-founder of OMS, commented: “This efficiency provides a practical solution to healthcare systems around the world that are facing a major crisis in staffing. Presently, healthcare providers simply cannot 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.

The Kings Fund, a healthcare think tank, noted: “The training of new staff is a key route to supplying the staff that health systems need. To address this crisis, health systems need to rapidly increase their training capacity.”

Michael Wallace, CEO and co-founder of OMS, added: “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.”

The company’s client base includes a range of NHS Trusts and universities as well as 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.

By Matthew Neville – Correspondent, Bdaily

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