Rural Health Innovation Collaborative Simulation Center

There is a medical training center that you have probably never heard of located right here in your back yard!    The "Rural Health Innovation Collaborative Simulation Center" - also known as "RHIC", is used to help med students and current medical personnel train on robot patients, without the risk of harming "human" patients.  In today's Healthy Living, we'll take you behind the scenes of its home at Union Hospital, as a group of med students try out the high-tech gadgets.

Jack Jaeger, the Director of the center, explains.  “The center was created by the RHIC to try to provide educational opportunities for current and future health care providers.  Imagine if you were a brand new nurse and going into a situation like we were doing today, which was an O.B. Obstetrical-Neonatal emergency, and never seeing that before.  What we try to do here is allow those nurses to get into that situation and get a feel for it, know what to say to the patient, to the other team members, so they can collaborate real well and that gets them prepared for doing it in real life.

“We bring in students ranging from nurses to paramedics to respiratory therapists to medical students, as well as Union Hospital’s current providers, which include doctors and nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists, and so forth.  And what we try to do is provide an environment that is safe for them, safe for patients, because we don't use live patients up here for this.  We always use the example of airline pilots do hundreds of hours of simulation before they step one foot into an airplane.  Well, we're trying to get nurses and doctors to go into rooms when they've never actually done anything on a patient.  And that's just not safe.

“The technology that we have up here is truly state of the art.  We have several items here, like the ‘Anatomage Table’.  There are only ten of them in the world!  The only one in Indiana at this point!  So, what we have here in the Wabash Valley, people should be proud of.  Not a lot of other places have this!”