Healing with Humanity: XR + Arts to Rehumanize Healthcare

Patients too often feel treated as conditions rather than people — a gap that undermines outcomes and drives unnecessary costs. Health professions, schools, and hospitals are increasingly turning to the visual arts and humanities to cultivate clinicians’ observation, empathy, perspective-taking, and self-reflection, and to help patients express and relieve their anxieties and trauma. These programs range from museum visits and guided art discussions to creative writing, drama, storytelling, painting, and improvisation. This panel showcases three companies using XR to scale humanities-based training and therapy for clinicians, students, and patients.

We’ll present case studies demonstrating measurable impacts on clinical skills, patient experience, and workforce resilience, and discuss practical strategies for integrating arts-and-humanities approaches into healthcare education and care delivery. The companies use different methods and have different goals but reflect the range of humanities based approaches that are being explored and validated in the health care industry.

ReflectXR uses XR technology and art practice to improve patients' mental health. Lightshed.io has partnered with John Hopkins School of Nursing and Medicine to train students in soft skills and patient care using storytelling techniques. MediaCombo's ViTaLS project has partnered with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and School of Nursing to train students in communication and critical thinking skills through art based conversations in a virtual museum gallery.

Involving the humanities in health professions training and patient care is more important than ever as AI begins to take over more and more of the work at every level of healthcare.