Office of Primary Care and Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) Program

(Photo: Fred Thys/VTDigger)

(SEPTEMBER 5, 2023) Raj Chawla, M.P.H., faculty technology liaison at Larner College of Medicine, commented to VTDigger for an article on a virtual code cart, a/k/a crash cart, created by a Rutland startup to train medical personnel in emergency response. “I’m thrilled to see a Vermont company developing in the extended reality field,” Chawla said.

Code carts enable medical personnel to save time in an emergency—if they know where everything is in the cart. Each hospital, and even different units within the same hospital, may configure their carts in different ways, which means that every time traveling nurses arrive at a new hospital or unit, they need to learn the new configuration—but nursing students rarely get a chance to open up a real code cart for training because of the complex protocols involved.

Enter Jeff Dejarnette, who founded a company called Tacitly to create a device with virtual reality (VR) goggles for hands-on interactive training on code carts. Dejarnette says Tacitly has tested its virtual code cart software with nurses and nursing students, including at UVM Medical Center, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Rutland Regional Medical Center and Castleton, where 30 nursing students tested the digital code carts. His biggest challenge, he said, is to get hospitals to adopt the technology because it is so new, he says.

Eventually, Dejarnette said, he would like to expand into other virtual devices, such as defibrillators as well as X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging devices.