Background
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi is India's leading medical education and research institution, and its teaching standards are widely treated as a benchmark by other colleges. On 6 April 2026 the institute opened a virtual reality training centre for medical and nursing education, its first move to bring headset-based simulation into everyday clinical teaching.
The deployment
The centre sits inside the institute's SET Facility (Skills, E-Learning and Telemedicine), the unit that already handles technology-assisted clinical teaching, and was built with the Chennai-based healthcare simulation firm MediSim VR. Students and qualified healthcare staff put on headsets and work through structured clinical scenarios that reproduce the look and the pressure of a real ward or procedure room, so a trainee can repeat a high-stakes procedure as often as needed without any risk to a patient.
What the partnership covers
Beyond running the centre, AIIMS and MediSim VR have agreed a joint research programme to evaluate AI-enabled VR as a teaching method: whether it measurably improves skill acquisition, how it can be used for assessment, and whether it makes training more consistent between cohorts and institutions. The stated long-term aim is to build the evidence needed to write VR into mainstream medical and nursing curricula, and eventually into training regulations.
Why AIIMS
Both sides framed the choice of institution as deliberate. AIIMS Director M. Srinivas argued that India's ambition to compete internationally has to extend to how it teaches and trains doctors, and that simulation lets a learner meet a clinical situation before meeting a patient. Ambuj Roy, professor of cardiology and head of the SET Facility, said integrating VR could redefine medical education by giving healthcare professionals greater precision and confidence, and set new benchmarks in training standards. MediSim VR's founders said an adoption by AIIMS carries disproportionate weight across the rest of India's medical education system.
Status
The centre is operating, but the deployment is at an early and deliberately evaluative stage: one facility at one institute, paired with a research agenda rather than a finished rollout. Neither the number of headsets and stations nor the specific clinical modules has been made public, and no hardware vendor has been named in any account of the launch.
