How HoloAnatomy Software Got Started
Nancy Farrow introducing another “WOW” moment at a conference.
By Nancy Farrow, AlensiaXR SVP Marketing & Global Business Development
Case Western Reserve University will always have a special place in my heart because I’m an alumnus. After graduating from CWRU and receiving my master’s degree, I worked for a large healthcare organization in multiple areas, including clinical education and training, marketing, operations, and medical simulation, specializing in building programs from the ground up. Little did I know that all those skills would coalesce into a single, extraordinary opportunity.
Four years ago this month, I stumbled upon a job description related to mixed reality and medical education. I showed it to a friend who said, “You MUST apply!” I submitted my resume at 6 p.m. that night… and got a call the next morning asking if I could come in for an interview.
It’s easy to find someone with sales skills. And it’s not difficult to find folks with experience in health care, education, or even mixed reality. But my background was a magical convergence of all of the above, and it became apparent after meeting with CWRU that I was uniquely positioned to introduce its HoloAnatomy® learning platform. HoloAnatomy provides anatomical instruction based on holograms rather than cadavers.
What an opportunity: To evolve medical education by replacing costly cadavers with 3D holograms. There's no going back once you experience the immediacy and “WOW” factor of learning anatomy through an interactive hologram!
Two months after I started, COVID hit. It was a difficult time. As the global pandemic exploded we were all asked to stay clear of campus. So I found myself trying to launch a learning platform without being able to meet with colleagues! It was a crazy beginning to this adventure.
Pocketbooks were suddenly closed—what school will spend money on new technology when the world has shut down? But CWRU believed in HoloAnatomy and told me to keep going, so that’s exactly what I did.
There was no way to showcase in person during the early phase of COVID. Instead, my focus was on building the infrastructure required to take the software to market when schools were ready to return to normal operations. I worked on marketing materials to build awareness and excitement around the platform, as well as onboarding resources to ensure customers could immediately benefit from HoloAnatomy’s improved learning outcomes and cost savings (CHSU reports “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved”).
I had lots of help from CWRU colleagues and the university’s Interactive Commons, a center dedicated to applying interdisciplinary collaboration and visualization to advance research and education. In fact, as the creator and first adopter of HoloAnatomy, CWRU was able to continue anatomy instruction despite COVID; when cadaver labs were all shut down, HoloAnatomy enabled professors to teach virtually with students in their dorm rooms! (Read more about CWRU’s global first here.)
The first education partner we brought onboard was Texas Christian University (TCU). Like CWRU, TCU was able to continue its anatomy program despite COVID.
“When the pandemic hit… our students could not come into the anatomy lab. The HoloAnatomy Software Suite provided an opportunity for us to help our students continue their training remotely. We could not be more pleased.”
—Dr. Stuart Flynn, TCU Founding Dean
Finger Lakes Community College was the next school we worked with, establishing my philosophy of looking at every academic institution through the same lens—whether it’s an Ivy League school like Oxford or a community college like Finger Lakes.
No longer do you have to be part of an accredited school to study anatomy. Now anyone with an inherent curiosity can learn from virtually anywhere in the world. All you need is a Wi-Fi connection, a mixed-reality headset, and HoloAnatomy software. That’s why NBC Nightly News reported, “Virtual learning is democratizing what has been an elite understanding of the human body.”
In the early years, I worked with Microsoft to develop webinars to communicate HoloAnatomy benefits. These webinars also proved the potential of the Microsoft HoloLens headset, the first device for which the software was programmed. This established a fruitful collaborative relationship and helped put us on the map. In fact, CWRU was just named Microsoft Mixed Reality Partner of the Year.
Our mission is to bring this groundbreaking software to nurses, radiologists, surgeons, physical therapists, dentists, podiatrists—any practitioner who needs to develop a thorough understanding of the body’s structure and systems.
In early 2022 I attended my first conference, the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in Los Angeles. I offered HoloAnatomy demonstrations, and the surprise and delight were incredible! Witnessing all those “WOW” moments was when I realized that our software was going to change medical education forever.
For academic institutions, acquiring a new technology can be a long process. So it wasn’t until the end of 2022 that I started seeing partners line up to integrate HoloAnatomy into their curricula. Since that first conference, I’ve been to at least a dozen more, and as a result we’re starting to get much more traction in the sector. In fact, now we’ve got people looking for us at conferences, bringing colleagues, friends, and industry peers who want to see first-hand how HoloAnatomy is revolutionizing anatomical instruction. Once they’re blown away by the experience, they rapidly shift to analyzing budgets and timelines to find the ideal moment to engage, bringing in technical teams and faculty to align and build consensus around an integration plan.
We’ve now introduced HoloAnatomy to an extraordinary list of education partners, and preliminary studies have revealed extraordinary results:
Medical students learned anatomical content almost twice as fast compared to traditional cadaveric dissection.
Medical students who supplemented dissection with HoloAnatomy retained information 44% better when tested on the same content eight months later.
Illuminating the Future of Medical Education
Early this year, AlensiaXR was formed at the request of CWRU to accelerate HoloAnatomy momentum, and we’re growing with speed. It’s great to be working with an experienced, passionate team that shares my intention of introducing this pioneering software all over the globe.
There’s so much amazing potential ahead. We’re working to improve service to our growing list of schools, expand the HoloAnatomy offering, deepen our relationships with industry partners, and attract new academic partners who want to improve the way their students discover the mysteries of the human body.
Stay tuned, we’re just getting started…
AlensiaXR: Immersive collaborative experiences that improve learning outcomes
