Summary: The third episode of the VHA Innovation Ecosystem podcast, VHA:IE, focuses on 3D printing and its uses within the medical community. On this episode, you will hear from a team using 3D printing for art therapy and another team using 3D printing for pre-surgical planning, as well as the plan for a 3D printing training network. You’ll also hear from the creator of a 3D printing community creating free prosthetics. The first program, 3D Printing as Art Therapy, seeks to make 3D printing an integral part of recreational therapy. The program is based out of White River Junction VA Medical Center, where Recreational Therapist Brooke Robertson-Drew and VA Innovation Specialist Brynn Cole have found that 3D printing is allowing Veterans to express themselves in unique and unexpected ways and form positive relationships while learning a new skill. The second VA effort highlighted is 3D Printing for Pre-Surgical Planning, which focuses on using 3D printing to enhance Veteran care by improving understanding of complex patient anatomy. Medical imaging coupled with 3D printing can allow physicians to see and interact with patient anatomy before the patient goes to the operating room. The program is headed by Dr. Beth Ripley, an Innovation Specialist and Staff Radiologist at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. Our third segment comes from the Chillicothe VA Medical Center, where Innovation Specialist Scott Bryant heads the 3D Printing Program. Through this program, Scott and his team train staff from other medical centers on the use of 3D printing to improve healthcare through classroom learning and hands-on creation. The program then provides 3D printing kits for the trainers to train other employees at their medical centers who are engaged in patient care. To end the episode, Jennifer Owen, the founder of Enabling the Future, speaks about the global network of volunteers who use their 3D printers to create free, 3D-printed hands and arms for those in need of an upper limb assistive device. The network of e-NABLE volunteers collaborate on ways to improve open source 3D-printable designs for hands and arms for those who were born missing fingers or who have lost them due to war, disease, or natural disaster. Episode Resources: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs The Diffusion of Excellence Initiative VA Innovators Network 3D Printing as Art Therapy 3D Printing for Pre-Surgical Planning e-NABLE Key Episode Quotes: “It's really incredible to get a group of Veterans together to embark on this new journey of learning a specific skill set, and it's not focused around trauma. It's not a group mental health session. It really is a shared experience.” – Brynn Cole, Innovation Specialist at the White River Junction VA Medical Center “The fact that we can now give surgeons a chance to train or practice and kind of get a practice run, looking at their patients' anatomy before they go into the operating room, is huge.” – Dr. Beth Ripley, Innovation Specialist and staff radiologist at the Seattle Division of the VA Puget Sound Health Care System “One of our Veterans is in a wheelchair, and he’s involved in the wheelchair games. He said one of the major issues they have at the games is, “Where do I put my helmet?” They have to put it on their lap, the helmet falls off, and he really wanted to make some kind of a holder for that. He was able to do that on the 3D printer.” – Scott Bryant, Innovation Specialist at the Chillicothe VA Medical Center “Because there's such a diverse amount of experiences throughout the community, you can have a design where somebody's trying really, really hard to figure out how to work a tensioner so that the fingers all work properly and the engineers are overthinking it and then, suddenly, the guy who plays guitar goes, ‘Well, why don't you just make a tensioner box like you would be able to tune a guitar?’ and they're like, ‘Why didn't we think of that?’.” – Jennifer Owen, Founder of enablingthefuture.org
