Shift's Wendy Morgan, right, and Maggie Hubell, plan a virtual reality training session. The company uses VR to train nurses and health care staff.

Using virtual reality goggles, a Bend-based business is shaping the future of nurse training with faster and individualized hands-on experiences.

In the virtual world, nurses can learn how to don and doff personal protective equipment properly, how to correctly wash their hands and take a pulse, as well as other new skills. The training is low stakes and doesn’t risk any harm to patients.

For hospitals, it means money saving training that can help with nurse retention.

With virtual reality training, what normally would require two hours for in-person training can take 30 minutes, said Maggie Hubbell, CEO and co-founder of the company developing this training, Shift. The technology allows users to feel like they’re really doing a medical task.

“I realized early how powerful virtual reality was for training,” said Wendy Morgan, co-founder and chief products officer. “You can’t separate yourself from what you’re perceiving as the reality. That’s the key component in the gaming world. We use that as a foundation of our training.”

The Shift training can help with that by adding muscle memory while using virtual reality goggles. The nurses can experience what mindful practices do to them. They can practice deep breathing, Hubbell said.

Shift sells virtual reality training sessions to hospitals that can be used by the health care systems for nurse retention and training, according to the company.

Training like this is a the wave of the future, said Todd Laurence, Oregon State University-Cascades business professor. Using this kind of immersive technology allows the trainee to experience the exercise, Laurence said.

“We’ve known for a while that virtual reality, the immersive experience, where you can act out or play the role in training is a much more effective training vehicle,” Laurence said. “It builds in muscle memory. Virtual Reality is more experiential than books and videos.”

Virtual reality training will only grow, Laurence said. Recently, Apple released new virtual reality glasses, a long awaited product that will drive visual computing and allow other forms of training, he said.

Last year, the industry with the highest annual average wage in Deschutes County was the information industry, which had an average wage of $109,173 for the year, according to the Oregon Employment Department. This industry includes telecommunications and publishing firms, data processing firms, and broadcasting, content providers and virtual reality.

It is also a traded sector that the Economic Development for Central Oregon works to attract to the region.

How it all started

Hubbell and Morgan came together through a mutual friend to launch Shift. Morgan came with experience in technology and Hubbell came with startup experience. These complementary skills formed the backbone of their company, which at the time was geared to educational and corporate bias training using virtual reality.

Then the pandemic hit. No one was training in education. But the medical field needed lots of remote training.

“Having a passion for what you do and how it helps others has kept me going to continue to do this work as a startup,” Hubble said. “If we’re not making the world a better place, we’re not interested.”

Shift works with hospital systems by providing nursing education, and helps hospitals become more efficient with nurse training. One of the partnerships in the works is through Columbia School of Nursing in New York, the University of Oregon and the University of Auckland, to further test and validate outcomes of training methodology.

“This is launching us in a variety of directions and we get to work with incredible institutions,” Hubble said. “We’re doing something better than what was out there by helping the learning of soft skills and saving hospital time and money.”

Since 2021, with the help of content experts, Shift has launched 11 new products focused on disrupting bias. One program is a nine week course using virtual reality, Morgan said.

Since starting Shift in 2019, the company has been steadily expanding its reach. Shift now has clients in Oregon and Southern California.

The pair were able to fund Shift with a $250 million government contract, $500,000 in customer revenue, $250,000 in grants and $1 million in investments. And recently, the company was accepted into the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program’s eighth cohort, where it will get help scaling it’s training programs designed to teach new skills and develop critical thinking in a life-like environment.

Where Shift is headed

The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program partners Shift with 10 health-tech startup companies from around the world. The companies are selected because they build on a variety of culturally appropriate digital mental health services to wearable devices that help patients manage chronic asthma.

“Partnering with (Cedars-Sinai, the No. 1 hospital in the West Coast) really supports our ability to bring some of the best training content in the world to more and more nurses,” Hubbell said. “In five years Shift will have had considerable expansion in the health care market while still maintaining our core focus on creating belonging and health equity.”

Using the virtual reality glasses allows the trainees to step into another reality and experience a scenario. In one training, the participant is exposed to biases about homeless in virtual reality simulations, which can shift a person’s perspective, according to a video Shift has online.

Because nurses are the biggest component of the health care workforce, training efficiently and repeatedly is important to the well-being of the workforce population, but also for the institution they work for, Hubbell said.

“More than any other health care worker, changes come last for nurses,” Hubbell said. “We need to take steps to make sure the nurses don’t burnout. “

“Nurses go into health care to improve lives,” Morgan said. “We can’t fix the system, but we can fix the training space.”