ABSTRACT
The Destiny Empathy Training allows the audience to look out the window of a pregnant woman from Appalachia who struggles with drug addiction. The Destiny Empathy Training project bridges the gap between lecture-based delivery and personalized home visits by training community healthcare providers serving Medicaid patients using cinematic VR (or: cine-VR) technology. This training has been made available at no cost in Ohio through grant funding from the Medicaid equity simulation project. The Destiny Empathy Training project focused on the implicit biases toward unmarried, opioid-dependent women. The use of cine-VR allowed the team to create a relatable and believable protagonist, Destiny, a twenty-three-year-old woman who struggled with an addiction to opioids. Cine-VR allowed users to personally explore details in Destiny's life, including her workplace and living environments. If seeing out a patient's window cultivates empathy, this project comes very close to making this happen, albeit briefly, through the use of cine-VR technology.
