What it is
Boston Children's Hospital's Immersive Design Systems (IDS) group helped develop PREP-VR — Pediatric Remote Exposure Preparation virtual reality — an immersive preparation tool used with the hospital's own patients and their families. It takes the form of a virtual 360 tour: ahead of a procedure, a family can see first-hand the areas of the hospital they will be visiting, pick up the care information they need, and get answers to the questions they are likely to have, all before the day itself.
Where it sits
IDS is Boston Children's in-house simulation and design lab — formerly the hospital's Simulator Program — working across clinician training, human factors and systems design, applied engineering and patient-centred simulation. On the patient-facing side, the hospital uses simulation both to teach families to deliver care at home after discharge, including feeding tubes, ventilators and central venous access, and to let patients preview a hospital visit before a medical procedure or complex surgery, with the stated aim of reducing anxiety by letting them experience what to expect.
PREP-VR is the immersive strand of that work. It runs alongside preparation that is not immersive: notably an in-person, station-by-station rehearsal day that adolescents facing spinal fusion surgery attend with their multidisciplinary care team, seeing the medical spaces and equipment that will be used and learning about post-operative recovery; and individualised preparation through exposure, desensitisation and rehearsal for patients with heightened sensory or cognitive-emotional needs.
What the hospital does not state
Boston Children's presents PREP-VR as part of its standing patient-centred simulation service rather than as a study. It does not publish a launch date, the headset or delivery platform used, or a development partner — the wording is that IDS helped develop the tool — and it gives no usage or outcome figures. No peer-reviewed evaluation of PREP-VR was found in the literature.
Separately, Boston Children's runs a public panoramic virtual tour of the hospital at tour.childrenshospital.org, with pre-set journeys between destinations and clickable hotspots carrying information, images and video. The hospital does not state whether that tour shares content or technology with PREP-VR.
