The hologram doctor will see you now
Summary
A Tennessee cancer clinic is beaming doctors out to rural areas, a new model of telehealth that goes beyond clunky videoconferencing systems.
Last year, some cancer patients in Tennessee and Mississippi got a startling offer: Instead of videoconferencing with oncology specialists located hours away, they could see a hologram doctor, courtesy of the same special effects that have projected the Jonas Brothers and other celebrities at concerts and live events.
The offer came from West Cancer Center & Research Institute, a health system that employs about 61 doctors and serves about 19,240 new patients a year across 12 locations in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. The system’s main clinic is in Germantown, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis.
Its doctors typically spend hours on the road each week getting to the satellite clinics to see patients in more rural locations, while also relying heavily on videoconferencing for check-ins. Now, however, two of those clinics are replacing the video calls with life-size hologram-like displays, part of a cross-industry push to take videoconferencing to the next level.
“You get my body language, my hand motions, there’s expression that is able to be conveyed, which as you can imagine in an oncology visit is very important," said Dr. Sylvia Richey, chief medical officer and medical oncologist at West Cancer Center.
“You’re not pixelated. There aren’t crazy parts of your body missing," she said. “It’s really amazing." The hologram system has been rolled out at the Corinth, Miss., and Paris, Tenn., clinics.
The setup works like this: Doctors are beamed from a small production studio in the Germantown clinic and appear in life-size boxes in designated exam rooms at the satellite clinics. The boxes are fronted with a flat, clear 4K LCD screen, and a specialized lighting setup inside gives the flat image an appearance of three-dimensionality.
Patients, however, aren’t being projected as holograms to the doctors. In the clinics, they communicate via camera—an intentional choice, Richey said, to give the patient, rather than the doctor, the more realistic experience.
“I can see the patient well enough to recognize a rash or a lump or a problem. I can’t feel everything. But oftentimes, that’s all we need," Richey said.
The hardware and software is provided by Proto Hologram, a Los Angeles-based startup known for creating holograms at concerts, corporate conferences and other live events.
Proto has beamed everyone from the Jonas Brothers to MrBeast, Paris Hilton and Antonio Neri, chief of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Richey said the West Cancer Center spent about $70,000 on the entire setup, which includes Proto’s boxes and software to power the projections.
The technology has been slowly developing ever since the spectral appearance of Tupac Shakur in hologram form on a Coachella stage in 2012.
Broadly, it is still mostly limited to one-off gimmicks rather than used as a daily communication tool, said Tuong Nguyen, a director analyst at Gartner. As a communications medium, he said, it faces a similar dilemma to that of augmented and virtual reality: While it may be better than videoconferencing, is it a big enough leap to justify the cost?
Proto thinks so.
“I don’t think you can say we only do one-offs when we have dozens of Fortune 500 companies who are all repeat customers—many using Proto for daily corporate communications, marketing and training," Doug Barry, Proto co-founder, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, said in a statement. “We believe 2D communication/displays are going away."
The company said it is also working to reduce the cost. The price of the box was recently lowered to $29,000 from $65,000, thanks to some efficiencies on the manufacturing side. The software that powers the projections is included free for the first year, and then costs $5,000 a year going forward.
Proto said it is HIPAA-compliant and expects full certification in April. It is also working with Indigenous Pact, a Native American healthcare service, which has bought several of the units and plans to put them in new clinics, with the first one opening later this year in Northern California.
But according to Todd Bouman, who was appointed CEO of Proto last month, the healthcare market remains secondary to Proto’s core businesses of live events and corporate communications.
In other words, you’re still more likely to encounter a hologram of midtier television presenter Howie Mandel than your general practitioner. At least, for now.
