Practical training before things get serious 

SimMedEx (Simulator Medical Excellence)

Before pilots take the controls of an aeroplane, they have spent many hours in the simulator. They practise procedures, internalise routines and train for challenging situations – so that, in the end, they are fully prepared. Why shouldn’t this successful principle also enrich medical training? This is precisely where the start-up SimMedEx, founded by two medical students at Witten/Herdecke University, comes in. Their aim: to proactively support surgical training and take it to a new level – benefiting hospitals, trainee specialists and, ultimately, patients too.  

The idea arose from the founders’ own experiences: medicine is evolving rapidly thanks to technological progress – and it is precisely this potential that SimMedEx aims to harness to bring practical training up to date. Day-to-day life in the operating theatre is highly complex and often characterised by enormous time pressure, which naturally makes it difficult to provide detailed instruction during a procedure. SimMedEx offers trainee surgeons a modern training facility where they can consolidate their understanding of fundamental techniques and procedures in advance. In this way, they build up motor skills and routine even before they assist with procedures on human patients. 

To this end, the start-up relies on simulators that realistically replicate various abdominal operations. Software virtually recreates the anatomical conditions, whilst surgical instruments are used to practise specific movement sequences and surgical skills. To make the training as targeted as possible, SimMedEx has designed a structured curriculum based on the continuing professional development catalogue for specialists, which can be individually adapted to each trainee’s level of knowledge. Procedures can be repeated as often as necessary, and trainees can precisely track their own learning progress. 

To ensure that this innovative technology is not held back by high purchase costs, SimMedEx has adopted a rental model. The start-up aims to pre-finance the simulators and make them flexibly available to hospitals for which purchasing their own training equipment has, until now, been too great a hurdle. Initial partnerships with hospitals in the Rhine-Ruhr region are now set to demonstrate how simulation can be meaningfully integrated as a valuable component into day-to-day work and training.