Surgical flight simulator

Nishanth Krishnananthan Takes Medical Mastery To New Heights

by Matt Webber

Aburning desire to make surgery safer set Bond University Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery graduate Dr Nishanth Krishnananthan (Class of 2005) on an incredible entrepreneurial journey.

At the end of the day, ‘Nish’ didn’t really have a choice.

“I come from a huge family of doctors,” he explains. “My mum’s a GP. My sister’s in paediatrics. And I’ve got 29 first cousins who are in every specialty you can think of. You get the picture! My occupational destination was pretty much pre-determined.”

That said, he did arrive at medicine the long way.

A year of a psychology degree and way-too-confusing Freudian theory at Macquarie University saw him switch to pharmacy at Griffith. But when an offer to study at the new health faculty at Bond University emerged in 2005, he quickly made like the rest of his family and signed up for a career in medicine.

“I was part of one of the first cohorts studying to be a doctor at Bond. It was exciting to be part of a small cohort of 70 people learning in this terrific new PBL (problem-based learning) environment,” he says.

And it may well have been those early educational fundamentals, combined with nagging doubts about where medicine would ultimately lead him, that set Dr Krishnananthan up for what would come later.

“Perhaps because medicine for me was basically pre-set as an occupation, it’s not necessarily something that fascinated me in the way many others find it entirely immersive. I went through my first couple of years extremely unsure about where it all might lead.”

After graduating and a stint as a surgical registrar in the NSW Health system and time at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Austin Hospital in Melbourne as a research fellow, Dr Krishnananthan’s interests in teaching and surgery began to merge.

“One of the things that always stood out to me was how people went about learning surgical procedures and how that knowledge was handed down,” he says. “The archaic and subjective ‘see one, do one, teach one’ system of learning something troubled me.”

Learning more about the way pilots learn to fly planes was another turning point.

“Trainee pilots have to successfully log a significant length of time on flight simulators before they’re let loose on the real thing,” he says. “Why shouldn’t clinicians be afforded the same opportunity?”

Collating these thoughts and putting them into something resembling a business plan was a collective effort.

Dr Krishnananthan’s good friend, Dr Vijay Paul, who finished medicine at UQ at around the same as Dr Krishnananthan finished at Bond, shared a similar vision to build a virtual reality-based training tool for clinicians.

Enter Vantari VR.

“Vantari VR is the flight simulator of healthcare. We help doctors, nurses and students learn life-saving procedures in a safe scalable VR environment,” he says. “Our whole mission is to eliminate medical error.”

Dr Krishnananthan and Dr Paul had dabbled in medical entrepreneurship by establishing a Facebook-like mentorship forum for clinicians called ‘DocLife’. Their inability to support their idea with commercialisation while still sustaining medical careers left them determined not to make the same mistake twice when their new idea was starting to form.

“We wanted to make sure we were fully supported and funded. It took us six months of learning and listening. We had to be open to know what we didn’t know technologically too. We found a wonderful partner in our now Chief Technology Officer, Daniel Paull, during this period.”

So, armed with a great idea and a trio of co-founders now in place, acceptance into the NSW Health incubator and subsequently Australia’s leading health tech entrepreneurial accelerator program, HCF Slingshot, helped kick things along.

“We were accepted into the program and pitched to an audience of 400 including potential investors in a dark V-Max cinema which was in hindsight quite daunting,” he says.

Whatever they said worked. Some early funding arrived, and Vantari VR was up and away.

“Think of us like an app on the App Store. You download it onto your laptop, you log in through a user account, and then you select the medical procedure that you want to perform. It could be a basic procedure like inserting an intravenous cannula or it could be something far more complex like a chest drain or central venous line insertion. You throw on a headset. Thereafter you are completely immersed in a life-like environment. A virtual operating theatre or emergency bay, for instance. You perform your chosen procedure start to finish according to best practice in line with college guidelines and your proficiency score is automatically logged at the end.”

The idea has caught on. These days the Vantari VR roll-out is on in earnest.

“Our strong team of 20 is mostly based across Australia with a few in the US,” he says. “We are in 12 hospitals globally, including Royal Prince Alfred and Nepean Hospital in Sydney, and Royal Perth and Fiona Stanley in Western Australia, as well as La Trobe Regional in Victoria. We’ll soon be setting up in Queensland and South Australia, and reaching regional hospitals is paramount for us as access to training is even more challenging in those environments. We are so excited in 2023 to continue rolling out in North America as well as commencing distribution opportunities in the MENA region, India and Asia.”