Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS), which provides highly realistic virtual reality healthcare training, has raised £2.1 million in funding. The investment came from ACF Investors (which backed Silveray and Veremark), and angel investor Dr Nicolaus Henke, former chairman of Quantum Black and former head of McKinsey’s global healthcare practice.
Eyes to scale its US expansion
Oxford Medical Simulation will use this latest funding to rapidly expand its product offering across healthcare education and practice, and to scale its US expansion.
Michael Wallace, CEO and co-founder of OMS, commented on the investment: “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.
Tim Mills, Managing Partner at ACF Investors commented, “Oxford Medical Simulation is providing state of the art, immersive training which uses emerging VR and AR technology to tackle the global healthcare worker shortage head-on. The team has already achieved some fantastic results – as seen in the company’s growth momentum and the quality of its customer base. It is, quite rightly, a demanding customer base, but they have shown the potential to ensure we all have access to highly trained healthcare professionals in the future.
Dr Nicolaus Henke added, “Michael and his team are transforming the way healthcare training is delivered and experienced. Virtual simulation creates a better and more immersive training experience for learners, while at the same time freeing up very experienced senior nurses and doctors for important clinical and education leadership tasks. Not only do I see a broad market need for this technology in clinical education and training, but the opportunity to create a higher quality, more engaging training experience will be of enormous benefit to wider society”.
What challenge does it tackle?
Reportedly, the US will face shortages of up to 450,000 registered nurses and 80,000 physicians by 2025. Studies suggest that pressures resulting from these shortages will also compromise the competency of newly trained staff, worsening the situation. 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.
Oxford Medical Simulation was founded by Jack Pottle and Michael Wallace in 2017 in London. It delivers virtual reality medical simulation, training healthcare professionals to provide consistently world-class patient management without risking lives.
VR training for healthcare professionals
OMS uses immersive VR simulations with AI-controlled patients to train healthcare professionals. Using VR headsets or on screen, learners can practice managing patients in one of hundreds of virtual clinical scenarios, repeating as many times as they need, whenever and whenever they need to. OMS improves the speed and efficiency of workforce training, ensuring health systems can deliver the optimal care to their patients.
The company’s client base includes a wide range of NHS Trusts and universities as well as leading US universities, including John Hopkins University and Duke University, and several US health systems.
