Virtual Reality-Assisted Informed Consent for Anesthesia: A Prospective and Randomized Proof-of-Concept Study

Background/Objectives: Informed consent for anesthesia poses both legal challenges and problems of understandable communication. Fulfilling all the requirements through anesthesiologists directly interacting with patients is a time- and staff-consuming strategy. Given today's smart technologies, notably including virtual reality (VR), we explored in a prospective randomized study whether 'VR-assisted informed consent' could improve this situation. Methods: Fifty patients scheduled for orthopedic surgery were randomized. In the control group, informed consent was obtained via patient-specialist dialogs only. The patients in the study group, wearing a head-mounted display, watched an 8 min immersive 3D movie with the standard explanations of general anesthesia, followed by a patient-specialist dialog to address open questions. The time spent on the dialogs in both groups was evaluated as the primary outcome variable. As secondary variables, we analyzed both a three-item Likert scale on patient satisfaction with the VR experience and cost differences between both groups. Results: Patient-specialist dialogs were carried on for median (IQR) durations of 93 (20-182) seconds in the study group versus 665 (261-829) seconds in the control group (p < 0.001). All the patients exposed to VR rated this experience as favorable (87.5%) or neutral (12.5%). Based on anesthesiologists' incomes in the US and UK, our approach would reduce the staff expenditure for each patient-specialist dialog by median amounts of USD approximate to 40 or approximate to 11, respectively (2 x p < 0.001). Conclusions: 'VR-assisted informed consent' for anesthesia is well accepted by patients and reduces the time requirements for patient-specialist dialogs, thus pointing out a potential avenue towards increasing the work-time efficiency of anesthesiologists.