AMEE 2026 opens in Vienna this Saturday: five days at the Austria Center, 22 to 26 August, with the Ottawa Conference folded in for the first time, so assessment sits right at the centre of the programme alongside the main theme, Educators as Catalysts: Building the Future of Health.
I've been going to AMEE for years and the thing I look forward to most has never really changed. It's the corridor conversations. But this year there's something different about it for us, and I want to explain what and why: ten research papers built on work done with Virti, a workshop on bringing extended reality into medical, surgical, and dental education, and a strong Taiwanese presence that shows how immersive medical simulation training is moving from interesting pilots to evidence-backed practice.
Ten Research Papers in Healthcare Education
Ten research papers being presented in Vienna were built on work done with Virti. Not marketing case studies. Papers written by clinicians and educators, submitted through the normal abstract process, judged on their own merits.
One of them has already been published, and it's a good illustration of what the rest look like. A team at MacKay Memorial Hospital in Taipei built a 360-degree VR module on eclampsia — a rare and dangerous complication of pregnancy that most medical students will never see during a one-month obstetrics rotation. They filmed real clinical footage in their own labour ward, put it into Virti with the fetal heart tracings, the lab data and the decision points, and ran 46 fifth-year students through it before and after testing.
Knowledge scores went up, with a moderate effect size and a p value of 0.001. Usability scored 73 on the system usability scale, which is a solid pass. The detail I like most is buried in the methods: the module worked in a headset, and it also worked through a web link on a phone or a laptop. That's the difference between a pilot in one department and something a whole cohort can actually use. It's in Virtual Reality, volume 30, this year.
The others run across similar ground:
- Interprofessional round-table simulation
- A suicide gatekeeper training programme for firefighters
- Virtual patients for nursing students, where patients respond to learner actions in real time and support clinical decision-making
- Enteral nutrition training for dietitians using a virtual human, with a variety of cases including patients aged 6 months to 99 years and over 250 peer-reviewed clinical cases for training
There is also a strand of work looking at what happens to the cost of teaching when you add virtual patients to a curriculum rather than adding more standardised patient sessions — the question every education lead I speak to eventually gets to.
Last year at Barcelona, six hospitals published or presented using Virti. This year it's ten papers. I'd rather let that number speak than dress it up.
Taiwan
The Taiwanese government is sponsoring over 400 delegates to Vienna. Nearly all of them are our customers.
For context: Taiwan has 241 abstracts accepted this year, which is 20.7% of the total and the largest share of any of the 84 countries taking part — ahead of the US and the UK. If you've been watching medical education research over the last five years you'll have seen this coming. Taiwan's output in the core journals tripled between 2021 and 2025.
I'm going to Vienna partly to support our partners at HTC, who have done the work of getting Virti into Taiwanese hospitals properly rather than superficially, and partly to meet 18 superintendents and vice superintendents from the largest medical systems in Taiwan. Getting 18 of them in one city in one week doesn't happen at home. I've also been invited to Taiwan's Night on the Monday evening, hosted by NCKU, which is where most of that community gathers when it's abroad. I'm looking forward to it.
The Workshop on XR in Medical Education
Jag Dhanda is leading a session on Tuesday 25 August, 16:00 to 17:30, Room 2.83 on Level 2, in the AI and Technology Enhanced Learning track.
Integrating Extended Reality into Medical, Surgical and Dental Education: insights from 10,000 immersive experiences in the UK.
Virti is a proud sponsor and supporter of VRiMS. If you haven't seen Jag Dhanda's work on XR in surgical and dental education, join us.
Come and Say Hello
That's the actual reason for this post. If you're going to be in Vienna, I'd like to meet you.
Whether you're already using Virti, thinking about it, or you're a sceptic who thinks the whole immersive learning field is overpromising, I'd rather have that conversation over coffee than read it in a survey. Find me at the workshop on Tuesday, or message me and we'll sort out a time.
See you at the Austria Center.