John Heiner, MD, and the UW Health Orthopedic Team "Performs" Virtual Hip Replacement
Website for students, sought-after resource for joint replacement patients

MADISON - On Monday, April 24, students from Madison West High School will perform total hip replacement surgery. More than 220,000 other Americans who undergo the procedure each year can do the same. But there is no need to worry about the experience of the "surgeons," because the procedure takes place on a website- not in an operating room.

UW Health orthopedic surgeon John Heiner, MD, and his staff, along with Zimmer Orthopedics, teamed up to provide the technical oversight for a virtual total hip replacement module for Edheads.org- an Ohio-based, non-profit website geared to help students learn through educational games and activities designed to meet state and national standards.

West High students will be the first to test the module before the national launch while getting a first-hand look at what it is like to be an orthopedic surgeon performing a hip replacement.

What started out as an award-winning, interactive educational website designed to teach students and provide free lesson plans for teachers turned into a patient resource that garners over 2.5 million page views per month.

"A knee replacement patient asked me if I'd seen the Edheads site because he had performed a virtual knee surgery on the site," says Heiner. "It seemed like such a valuable resource for both patients and students that we contacted Edheads and asked what it would take to create a total hip module."

Shortly thereafter, Gail Wheatley, executive director of Edheads.org, and Eric Bort, Edhead's creative director visited Madison, observed two actual hip replacement surgeries and started programming.

"You really need to go to the site and try it out to know just how useful the information is," states Heiner.

In addition to the virtual surgery, there are actual photos of the procedure and a section of the site called "Interesting People" where several UH Health orthopedic employees and their careers are featured.

Rodney Barnes, a hip replacement patient of Dr. Heiner's, also appears in a patient video. "I didn't know about the site until after my surgery," states Barnes. "This is going to be a great service for patients who want to learn more about the procedure."

"It's a win-win situation for both students and patients. Our main goal was to create a unique, educational web experience designed to make hard-to-teach concepts understandable using the interactivity of the internet," states Wheatley. "The fact that we've developed a secondary audience of orthopedic patients makes our efforts even more worthwhile."

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First published: 07/15/02 Last updated: 05/16/08 webmaster@surgery.wisc.edu
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