Education > Transforming Medical Education at the Mastery Skills Lab

Transforming Medical Education at the Mastery Skills Lab

By Alison Caldwell, Ph.D. Photography by Paul Flessland

In a rapidly shifting technological landscape, Mayo Clinic is committed to ensuring that all clinicians are ready to use the latest tools. This investment is perhaps most evident at the Center for Procedural Mastery Skills, an advanced training and procedural space outfitted with the latest in simulation and extended reality technology. Under the leadership of Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education, this state-of-the-art space serves as a proving ground for clinicians across specialties.

The facility operates on a key value: Practitioners should never have to learn on actual patients. To ensure that this is the case, the lab offers learning opportunities across multiple modalities, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality, as well as physical simulators. These mixed models allow clinicians to train with patient-specific anatomical models, practice procedures repeatedly, and garner real-time feedback, all within a risk-free environment.

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“It’s all about experiential learning,” says Mark Morrey, M.D., medical director of procedural skills. “One size does not fit all, and we need to have the technology available to support all learners.” This philosophy represents a natural evolution in medical education, transcending traditional cadaveric training to embrace customizable, accessible learning opportunities.

The lab’s sophisticated collection includes endoscopy and arthroscopy simulators with haptic feedback, a Da Vinci robotics console, and an interventional radiology simulator utilizing anonymized patient images. Available around the clock, the facility serves not only medical trainees but also experienced surgeons seeking to master new techniques, as well as experts trying to make decisions about new equipment purchases and testing and modifying medical technologies.

The ability to learn something through an approach where you get all the input from your eyes and ears is so much better than just text on a page.
— Rabih Tawk, M.D.

There’s even a vending machine that dispenses practice tools for medical training. These include 3D-printed models of airways and blood vessels, practice kits for setting broken bones, and tiny instruments for detailed procedures. Each tool comes with a QR code that links to step-by-step videos of expert doctors demonstrating the proper techniques. This allows users to practice and learn at any time, day or night.

The team overseeing the lab even has systems to track learner progress and tool use, to monitor individual training progress and understand how the equipment is being used. “I get weekly updates on all 70 residents in the orthopedic training program,” says Dr. Morrey. “We can track their proficiencies against gold standards, and this is changing how we measure success in medical training.”

In addition to managing the lab and its resources, the team is studying how these technologies impact hands-on medical care, including research on how augmented reality and virtual reality training translate to procedural skills.

Neurosurgeon Rabih Tawk, M.D., believes that this is the new face of medical training. “Trainees prefer to see procedures in a video, to be active participants in these simulations and real-life surgeries. The ability to learn something through an approach where you get all the input from your eyes and ears is so much better than just text on a page.”

This innovative approach positions Mayo Clinic at the forefront of medical education, preparing the next generation of physicians for an increasingly technological future.