Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is experimenting with virtual reality as a way to reduce patient pain.

The Los Angeles hospital is working with Samsung Electronics America and AppliedVR, a developer of virtual reality content to distribute to patients virtual reality headsets connected to calming content, chief medical officer and Samsung Electronics head of healthcare and fitness Dr. David Rhew told Internet Health Management at the Consumer Experience and Digital Health Forum conference by the trade group Americas Health Insurance Plans last week in Chicago.

Cedars-Sinai is implementing virtual reality pilots across several areas, including the medical centers orthopedic and spine centers and department of surgery. Cedars-Sinai gives the virtual reality headset to a patient, shows him a 20-minute calming video, such as a helicopter ride over Iceland, a paint brush making strokes or swimming in the ocean with whales, to reduce pain or distract the patient, Rhew says.

That ability to distract, to take people to a different place, is so important, Rhew says.

Cedars-Sinai has tested it with patients and is now going through clinical trials to develop more specific outcomesand to demonstrate more diversified and positive results, Rhew says. Cedars-Sinai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We are undergoing a randomized clinical trial right now to evaluate how virtual reality with curated, personalized content, will allow us to reduce opiate use, reduce length of stay and reduce the time from the switch from IV to orals and overall patient satisfaction, and, of course, pain, Rhew says.

There are several cases in which using virtual reality helps patients in a hospital, Rhew says. For instance, taking a cast off of a child is often a frightening experience. If the child patient put on a virtual reality headset, this would distract him while the doctor takes off the cast and could reduce the childs stress level, Rhew says.

Another example is to use virtual reality to mitigate pain in a patient instead of administrating narcotic pain medication, which is often addictive, Rhew says.

This approach recently delivered positive results when a middle age women went to Cedars-Sinai with unexplained abdominal pain and the pain specialists could not figure out the cause, Rhew says. The doctors ruled out the most severe diagnoses and eliminated the need for surgery, so the doctors hospitalized her and put her on an intravenous narcotic drip to medicate her pain. The doctors then tried treating her pain with a virtual reality video and within 24 hours she said her pain was significantly reduced. She went off the narcotics and left the hospital.

So much of what happens in medicine, we dont have clear-cut answer, Rhew says. As long as the most serious issues are ruled out, instead of putting a patient through more diagnostics test, using virtual reality is a good option, he says.

AppliedVR charges hospitals a monthly fee for using the program which ranges from $99 a month for the therapeutic VR app content, up to $249 a month for the videos, the Samsung Gear VR headset, a Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone and technical support.