1. STAGED REALITY SURGICAL SIMULATORS
Allow residents to practice complex surgical skills
over and over the way you would practice
swinging a golf club or playing a musical instrument

2. Present day surgical skills training continues to rely on the
apprenticeship model where surgery is taught in the operating
room during actual operations. The demands for higher
operating room throughput, heavy scrutiny of operative
results, and increasing case complexity has significantly
hampered the ability of surgical educators to produce capable
surgeons with this model. In 2011, approximately 31% of
cardiothoracic (CT) surgery residents failed their medical
board examinations.
Allow residents to practice complex surgical skills
over and over the way you would practice
swinging a golf club or playing a musical instrument
STAGED REALITY SURGICAL SIMULATORS

3. Richard H. Feins, M.D., then Chair of the American Board of
Thoracic Surgery, after much study and
consultation, concluded that CT surgery training, being taught
solely as apprenticeship education in the operating room and
not a curriculum-based education, was no longer able to
produce the best and safest surgeons.
Dr. Feins proposed a structured curriculum that would guide
the residents through each possible surgical event that they
would encounter in practice via a step-by-step process with
planned increases in difficulty and complexity. This would only
be possible if there were a way for the students to learn in an
educationally sound environment operating on real tissue in
realistic operating circumstances.

4. Kindheart (KH) has developed a broad set of techniques to
animate animal organs and place them into human
mannequins with extreme fidelity. The mannequins are
draped as in real surgery and placed on an operating table
with the lights and sounds of the operating room arranged to
achieve Staged Reality™.
KH simulators allow residents to practice complex surgical
skills over and over the way you would practice swinging a golf
club or playing a musical instrument. Through
practice, training, and coaching in a controlled
environment, the medical resident is able to gain confidence
and competence before moving into an actual operating room
with a real human patient. While not easily quantified, it is
easy to see how this will improve patient safety and reduce
medical costs.

5. KH is a medical education company specializing in surgery
simulation systems using proprietary, animated animal organ
systems to teach curriculum-driven, real-world procedures and
proper responses to adverse events, enabling training and
practice that would be impossible or require surgery on
animals.
Operations using KH systems have been judged by leading
cardiothoracic surgeons to be indistinguishable from
operations performed on live animals, and, in some
cases, humans. Over 350 CT surgeons have operated on
KindHeart simulators, with 91% rating their experience as
“very or extremely helpful.” By eliminating the need to operate
on live animals, medical schools and medical device
companies avoid much of the criticism from animal rights
activists in addition to significantly lowering costs, greatly
expanding portability and dramatically increasing flexibility.