An attendee tries Google Glass during a 2013 Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco.
A Nashville surgeon has started to explore the benefits of wearing Google Glass in the operating room.
Google Glass, for the uninitiated, is a kind of wearable computer in the form of futuristic-looking glasses. A pair costs $1,500 a pop, meaning that it isn’t exactly on everyone’s shopping list just yet.
However, some believe the technology could have big implications for health care. In Nashville, a company called Octovis Inc., which is going through its “14-week startup boot camp” with Nashville-based business accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, is testing possible applications for Google Glass with a handful of physicians.
One of these physicians is Sanat Dixit, a neurosurgeon who has worked in the Nashville area for four years. He is the first Tennessee doctor to use Google Glass in the operating room, and one of the first doctors in the entire Southeast to use the new technology.
Dixit cannot disclose the name of the hospital where he has performed a couple of surgeries using this new technology because the hospital has not yet created an official Google Glass policy and wants to ensure that patient privacy is protected. That process is underway and will likely be a growing topic at other facilities as the use of Google Glass continues to grow.
Dixit says the true, useful application of wearing Google Glass is less “Minority Report” and more about boosting efficiency in the operating room.
For example, he often views surgeries he is performing through a microscope, and must look up, away from the procedure, to see screens that are broadcasting images of the patient.
Wearing Google Glass allows him to skip that step. Ideally, Dixit wants to be able to call up, then dismiss images right in front of his eyes using vocal commands. “It may seem like ‘Why bother?’ if you have the image in a room,” Dixit said. “But as a person who is fixated on operating and using a microscope, I don’t want to look up away from a surgical field.”
The technology has promise, he said, because companies like Octovis are asking doctors how to use it in their work.
“Most of the people developing health care software don’t understand what we do,” Dixit said. “A very common complaint among physicians is ‘This is great, but we can’t use this.’ ” But Dixit believes physician-centric technology could make life easier for both doctors and patients.
However, technology such as Google Glass raises legitimate questions about security.
For example, Google is a titan of cloud-based technology.
“We made the decision early on to not even go to the cloud,” said Eliot Houser, chief information officer for population health technology company Applied Health Analytics. “We are not planning on going there. We feel more secure housing and owning the infrastructure ourselves, even though it’s more expensive to do so.”
To address security concerns, Octovis CEO Ryan Macy says that for the devices in its pilot study, the company has tweaked the operating system that runs on Google Glass so that it is compliant with federal privacy laws such as HIPAA, turning the technology into what he calls a “completely clinical device.”
The company is in its early stages, but Macy says it will have a software-as-a-service business model. The hardware will evolve, Macy said. “Today, we’re supplying Glass, but sometime in the future, it’ll be Glass and smart watches.”
For now, Dixit says the pilot program has inspired him to come up ideas about new ways to use Google Glass in a hospital. Most of those ideas involve shortcuts that would make a physician’s life easier. Namely, accessing information without being tethered to a device.
This may be one step, not a leap, toward the future, but that’s all right by him.
“Look, it’s a cool device,” Dixit said, “but it’s got to be practical.” If it is, he thinks doctors will gravitate toward secure technology as long as it makes their lives easier.
Reach Shelley DuBois at 615-259-8241 and on Twitter at @shelleydubois.
Google Glass
Will it work?
In 2013, researcher Lucien Engelen began researching the potential impacts of Google Glass in the health care field.
His research has found several advantages of using the technology in the operating room:
• The quality of pictures and videoare usable for health care education, reference and remote consultation. The camera, however, needs to be tilted differently for most actual procedures.
• The technology does allow for tele-consultation during actual procedures, given that bandwidth issues are addressed.
• A protocol or checklist could be displayed on the Glass screen to help assist during procedures.
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