Enhancing Healthcare Skills and Promoting Health Equity - A Virtual Reality-Based mHealth Application for Empowering Healthcare Professionals in Empathetic, Compassionate, and Unbiased Patient Care through Digital Experiential Learning: Qualitative Study (Preprint)

Healthcare professionals' educational preparation and practices significantly influence care experiences and health outcomes. Deficient awareness of the impact of stereotypes, biases, prejudices, and social determinants of health (SDH) can lead to negative care experiences, strained healthcare professional-patient relationships, and health disparities. Addressing these challenges necessitates a focus on enhancing healthcare professionals' skills, including inclusive communication, cultural humility, recognition of SDH, and fostering empathy and compassion, which promotes health equity and improved care experiences. This research aims to present a mHealth (mobile health) application designed using a digital experiential learning (DEL) approach to strengthen healthcare professionals' competencies, thereby improving patient care experiences and promoting health equity. The key objectives are to deliver essential healthcare skills, such as cultivating cultural humility, developing inclusive communication proficiencies, understanding the lasting impact of SDH, comprehending how implicit and explicit biases affect health outcomes, and fostering compassionate and empathetic clinical attitudes, and promoting continuous professional development. Together, these aims support the advancement of patient-centered care and reducing health disparities. The presented mHealth application integrates virtual reality-based serious role-playing hypothetical scenarios and a life course module to provide healthcare professionals with immersive first-person learning experiences. The scenarios include a Syrian refugee with limited English proficiency and an African American pregnant woman with a history of opioid use disorder, each lasting approximately 30 minutes to facilitate the delivery of essential healthcare skills. The pre- and post-assessment questionnaires are integrated within the application to measure the learning outcomes of diverse professionals who voluntarily engaged with the application. Distinct hypotheses were formulated and evaluated, which referred to specific questions in the assessment questionnaire to assess the impact of the mHealth application on healthcare professionals' skills and attitudes. The presented mHealth application significantly enhanced healthcare professionals' skills and attitudes, including increased confidence, preparedness for patient interactions, awareness of the lasting impact of SDH, positive beliefs, reduced prejudice, improved perspectives on patient responsibility and external factors, and greater compassion and empathy. These outcomes, obtained through evaluating distinct hypotheses and analysis supported by multiple statistical approaches-including confidence interval analysis, Cohen's d effect sizes, 1-tailed paired t-tests, and descriptive response distributions-directly align with the study's objectives, fostering health equity and patient-centered care. Overall, the application effectively improved healthcare professionals' competencies, contributing to better care experiences and outcomes while promoting health equity. This study delivers a comprehensive data-driven evaluation that validates the effectiveness of the mHealth application in enhancing healthcare professionals' skills and fostering health equity. It addresses challenges in healthcare education by delivering a scalable, accessible, and immersive learning platform. Supported by virtual reality technology and experiential learning framework, the mHealth application presents a promising avenue to empower healthcare professionals with the skills needed to provide patient-centered care in diverse and complex healthcare settings.