by 
Though we spend ample time examining consumer-based XR endpoints, greater near-term impact is seen in the enterprise. This includes brands that use AR to promote products in greater dimension (B2B2C) and industrial enterprises that streamline their own operations (B2B).
These industrial endpoints include visual support in areas like assembly and maintenance. The idea is that AR’s line-of-sight orientation can guide front-line workers. Compared to the “mental mapping” they must do with 2D instructions, visual support makes them more effective.
And with VR, employee training and onboarding can be elevated through immersive sequences that boost experiential learning and memory recall. It also scales given that far-flung employees can get the same quality training, versus costly travel for senior training staff.
Altogether, there are micro and macro benefits to enterprise XR. The above micro efficiencies add up to worthwhile bottom-line impact when deployed at scale. Macro benefits include lessening job strain and closing the “skills gap,” which can preserve institutional knowledge.
But how is this materializing today and who’s realizing enterprise XR benefits? Our research arm ARtillery Intelligence tackled these questions in a recent report. It joins our report excerpt series, with the latest below on AR’s role in helping healthcare professionals cover more ground.
Eliminating Bottlenecks
Provide Community is a clinical care system. Like many healthcare organizations, it’s challenged by strained resources. For example, the workflows of healthcare professionals in its podiatry centers required senior clinicians to train junior staff and accompany them in patient visits.
This need for two individuals to be present in patient visits stretches the system’s resources. So Provide Community was eager to find ways to scale resources, elevate capacity, automate tasks, and upskill junior staff in more effective ways. Altogether it wanted to eliminate bottlenecks,
To achieve some of these goals, Provide Community tapped into assisted reality. Specifically, it equipped junior clinicians with Realwear Navigator 500 devices. The primary purpose was to receive line-of sight-reference information and live see-what-I-see support from senior experts,
That last part was particularly impactful because it allowed senior resources to be deployed with greater efficiency. Rather than each clinician being tied to an individual junior-staff patient interaction, they could placeshift themselves to several interactions, thus covering more ground.
Run Faster
So what were the results. Provide Community was able to double its capacity from 18 to 36 patient visits per day, per care unit; and save 3,744 hours annually. This is all a result of being able to disseminate institutional knowledge more efficiently through line-of-sight support.
The system also enabled junior staff to upskill faster. Compared to traditional methods such as having senior clinicians shadowing them, Provide Community’s AR integration engendered a better learning experience,. It also unlocked the ability for junior staff to do patient home visits.
Other strategic takeaways from this deployment include AR’s applicability to healthcare. These types of efficiency-boosting AR tools are potentially impactful in every industry, but perhaps more critical in medicine. That’s because of the field’s high value work and resource constraints.
In that sense, AR in medicine is often discussed in the context of helping surgeons perform complex procedures. But an equally-important and less-discussed use case is to support high-frequency patient visits through handy reference data that lets practitioners run faster.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next case study with more enterprise XR best practices and tactical takeaways…
Header image credit: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash