Exploring the Potential of Design Thinking in Healthcare Through the Integration of VR for Educational Purposes

Background: The healthcare education landscape has become increasingly complex, presenting a growing need for innovative problem-solving. One approach that has gained traction in recent years is design thinking, which prioritizes a patient-centric approach to solving complex medical challenges. As a result, design thinking has been integrated into the medical field to tackle these intricate issues. Objective: In order to gain a deeper understanding, we conducted a thorough literature review to analyze the outcomes of design thinking when applied to the use of virtual reality technology in medical training decision-making. The focus of our paper is to provide insights into the following research inquiries: RQ1: How has design thinking been incorporated in pre-training in Healthcare education? RQ2: How has technology such as virtual reality been used in educating medical students and practitioners? Methodology: An extensive search was conducted using virtual reality in healthcare training scientific research data between 2015 and 2024. The extensive search was done using databases including EBSCOhost, Springer, Pub Med, and Science Direct. The searches retrieved n = 10 original articles that were quality-checked and included for the review based on the search criteria. Conclusion: According to existing literature, Design Thinking in conjunction with VR technologies will be an effective means of pre-training medical students and practitioners. Although many healthcare studies incorporate Design Thinking without explicit recognition, there is still a lack of understanding and implementation of this approach in the healthcare industry to tackle the multifaceted challenges within the field.