To overcome these challenges, healthcare organizations need a way to rapidly hire and train new professionals, and to reskill and upskill their current workforces. To ensure a high standard of patient safety, satisfaction, and wellbeing, these professionals need to be trained on the latest hard skills (ex. digital skills), as well as soft skills like effective communication and emotional intelligence.

In particular, soft skills are often overlooked, yet essential for new and tenured healthcare professionals to develop in order to navigate change in their profession, and deliver the best patient experiences. Skills like problem solving, collaboration, empathy, communication and decision making need to be training priorities in order to help healthcare professionals deliver effective patient care.

To help healthcare professionals rapidly learn and develop skills, immersive learning presents a solution. Immersive technology is delivering soft skills training in a modality that is faster, more realistic and engaging, and more cost effective at scale than any other method. Given that people master these skills with practice, placing healthcare leaders in immersive role play with virtual human characters simulates critical conversations to accelerate soft skills development.

Turning the power of immersive learning toward effective communication and other crucial soft skills is the key to supporting healthcare professionals, and in turn, supporting patients, medical providers, and others that they engage with.