AstraZeneca
Helping Doctors Have a Change of Heart
Going mobile. The 53-foot Heart FXPod makes it easy for doctors to try out the CHF simulator because it travels right to the hospitals where they work.
“175 Simulations Without a Hiccup”
Another key reason for choosing Mac OS X as a platform for the Heart FXPod, explains Raymond, was its stability. “It doesn’t crash. I mean, that’s a big thing for me. You just don’t have to reboot. With Windows exhibits, you reboot everything twice a day, if you’re lucky not to crash before that. With the Mac mini, I had it running in my shop for two-and-a-half weeks solid and logged over 175 simulations without a hiccup. I doubt I would’ve gotten an eighth of that on the Windows side without having some driver issue, some kind of RAM malfunction, some basic quarrel.”
“Here’s this big scary heart failure simulator, and it runs off a cool little Mac mini.”
System stability was especially critical because of the sophisticated and exacting target audience. “I mean, you’re in front of doctors,” says Raymond. “I didn’t want to have techs having to reboot these things. There’s a trust factor that this is somewhat of a clinical device, which is kind of a funny story, too, because here’s this big scary heart failure simulator, and it runs off a cool little Mac mini. I told a couple of doctors about it at the launch and they could not get over it. This thing that they’re totally accepting as clinical — it’s not a procedure, but it’s something they can respect — is running off this little box. It was an interesting reaction.”
Giving them heart failure. Peter Raymond of Corsair Studio took only six months to deliver the Heart FXPod from concept to rollout.
So far, there have been no glitches after half a year and 70,000 miles in the field, but if there were any, says Raymond, he’s prepared. “I could pull a Mac mini off the shelf and have it show-ready in about 25 minutes. We keep a spare on hand, but I could have one drop-shipped from anywhere,” he says. “I could go to an Apple Store if I had to and just load the DVD with the entire program. I have Apple Remote Desktop set up to control each of the displays as well as allow an operator to receive the status of all the simulators at one time.”
Immersive, Yet Transparent
Because the Heart FXPod is a well-designed system combining stable and powerful Mac technology with physiologically realistic custom devices, it’s succeeding in its goal to help doctors leave their own sphere of reality and immerse themselves for a few minutes in a CHF patient’s experience, virtually walking in their shoes. It’s a experience made that much more realistic because the underlying technology, thanks to the Mac, is completely transparent to the user.
“Just talking to all these doctors who go through it, everyone really has the same reaction and takes away the same messaging, which is ‘I had no idea CHF was that bad. I now have more empathy for my patient,’”says Raymond. “So that was really the goal.”
“We’re quite pleased with the finished project,” adds Joanne Curley, Brand Leader for AstraZeneca. “It’s very rewarding to hear physicians tell me things like, ‘The Heart FXPod is an eye-opening experience. It’s the feeling of heart failure I didn’t learn in medical school.’ Or: ‘It changed my whole perspective on what cardiovascular disease must feel like.’ Peter and the team who created the simulation are, in my opinion, geniuses.”