How Apple Vision Pro is finding a home in healthcare

In early 2024, Ryan Broderick, a surgeon at UC San Diego Health, was commiserating with some colleagues about the profusion of screens in today’s operating rooms. Though the displays provided essential guidance for minimally invasive operations in progress, they also added complexity.

“We were looking around the operating room,” he remembers. “We have a lot of monitors, a lot of clutter. We were like, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this.’”

It wasn’t just about tidiness. ”For [a] monitor to be in the ideal position for surgery, it really should just be directly in front of your head without having to turn your neck or adjust your body,” explains Dr. Broderick. “But often in laparoscopy, you have to adjust your body, turn your neck, and be in uncomfortable positions. And with repeated use like that, it can lead to tight muscles, neck injury, back injury.”

The doctors’ frustration with this situation happened to come to a boil at an opportune time. On February 2, Apple released the Apple Vision Pro, its first headset. A major element of the device’s spatial computing experience was the ability to float multiple virtual screens of any size in real-world surroundings, unconstructed by the bulky inconvenience of physical displays. Dr. Broderick’s team got its hands on a loaner Vision Pro and worked with UCSD Health chief clinical and innovation officer Christopher Broadhurst to assemble a system capable of streaming video feeds and overlaying them on the live view of a surgery in progress, greatly reducing the need to crane necks.

In short order, the idea became a trial that involved real patients and is currently undergoing peer review. “We’ve done over 50 cases and have had great success thus far,” says Dr. Broderick.

Almost a year after reaching the market, the Vision Pro has a relatively low profile for an Apple product. Much of the discussion around the headset relates to the possibility of the company releasing a version for less than the current model’s imposing $3,499 price tag, a necessity for anything resembling widespread adoption. “Right now, it’s an early-adopter product,” CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen last October. “People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for.”

But UCSD Health isn’t the only medical institution that saw potential for the Vision Pro to be useful right away. Its launch prompted Sharp HealthCare, a major San Diego-based healthcare provider, to buy 30 Vision Pros and start a Spatial Computing Center of Excellence. Today, Sharp is hosting a summit on the Vision Pro’s applications in surgery, doctors’ offices, medical education, and beyond. ”There are 300 people coming—from 10 countries—who are beyond excited,” says Tommy Korn, an ophthalmologist with Sharp.

For Apple, the summit validates the Vision Pro’s power as a platform for new experiences, whose positive impact could be enormous.

”It’s a really exciting and timely moment to bring key industry leaders in healthcare together to not just sit there and listen to a bunch of keynotes, but to connect and talk and share how they’ve used Vision Pro to take best practices and inspiration from peers,” says Susan Prescott, the company’s VP of worldwide developer relations and enterprise and education markets, and a 22-year veteran of encouraging the use of Apple products in business contexts.

“This one is even surprising us”

The healthcare industry doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being at the forefront of technological change. But when Apple unveiled its headset, ”Many key leaders became very excited, and have not just been excited, but have put their money where their mouth is,” says Prescott. “Sometimes enterprises take a little time to adopt technology. This one is even surprising us in the alacrity with which the product is being used and the apps are being built.”

A few things did work in the Vision Pro’s favor. For example, from day one, it was designed for general-purpose computing. That’s a striking departure from the iPhone—which famously didn’t permit third-party apps until its second year—and even the iPad, which started out emphasizing lean-back content consumption over all else. Even the term spatial computing made the Vision Pro sound more like the Mac of the future than a mere VR gaming console you could strap to your face.

Unlike some other products in the Vision Pro’s conceptual zip code that have also courted healthcare users—such as Magic Leap—it also benefited from being part of the greater Apple ecosystem spanning the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. That lowered the bar of entry for developers who already had experience writing apps for Apple devices. It also piqued the interest of medical professionals who were comfortable with Apple products: Dr. Korn says that 90% of Sharp HealthCare doctors use iPhones and more than half use a Mac at home.

Then there’s the Vision Pro’s price—a lot of money for a consumer gadget but downright affordable by the standards of medical equipment. (“That’s a $20,000 monitor, that’s a $20,000 monitor,” Dr. Korn told me during our video call as he pointed at displays in a Sharp operating room used for testing purposes.) The fact that Apple didn’t skimp on the headset’s technology to hit a low price helped make it more suitable for healthcare: “We have the R1 chip that’s taking the feedback from the sensors and processing eight times faster than the human eye can blink,” says Prescott. “That’s great for anti-nausea, to help make sure people don’t feel unwell. But it’s also great as feeds are coming in with live, literally lifesaving, information.”

That’s not to say that the Vision Pro might not find even wider acceptance in healthcare if it were cheaper. “Obviously, it’s a V1 product, and the price, for now, is what the price is,” acknowledges Prescott. But along with letting doctors replace technology that’s more expensive and cumbersome, she adds, Vision Pro sometimes lets doctors “do something that wasn’t possible before that just improves patient outcomes, which at the end of the day is an important part of the success of a healthcare organization.”

Sharp partnered with Zeiss—the optical giant whose products include the prescription inserts available for the Vision Pro—to help develop an app that let ophthalmologists view cataract surgery videos using the headset. “They created the concept and brought it to us to test it and see how it worked in real life,” says Dr. Korn. Stryker, a maker of robotics for hip and knee surgery, released an app for reviewing surgical plans in 3D; medical publisher Elsevier published one with detailed models of the human heart and cardiovascular system.

In the months following the Vision Pro’s release, Apple nudged enterprise adoption along with VisionOS updates that buttressed the device’s use in professional-grade environments. For example, it brought over the iPhone’s Mobile Device Management features for configuring, securing, and otherwise wrangling the devices en masse—capabilities widely regarded as absolute necessities for enterprise use. It also added support for wide and ultrawide virtual Mac screens, improving the headset’s ability to squeeze down a whole lot of display real estate into a form that requires no desk space.

Despite the Vision Pro’s recognizably Apple-esque qualities, donning a headset remains a new kind of experience even if you’re just watching a movie or making a Zoom call, let alone performing surgery. However, UCSD Health’s Dr. Broderick says it’s not uncomfortable or distracting in the moment: “It’s pretty much not noticeable when you’re in the middle of the operation—the learning curve is near zero.” Operations typically last 45 to 90 minutes, time spans the Vision Pro can handle on one battery charge.

Dr. Broderick emphasizes that he believes spatial computing will be an entire field over time—rather than the Vjsion Pro remaining a category-of-one product—and that he’s already thinking about what’s next. “Say I have a resident who’s trying to do a case and they’re in the wrong spot,“ he says. “Rather than taking over from them, if I could draw on their video feed in space where they should go, that might be helpful. And telementoring can be helpful for advancing training as well as providing care for patients who might be in a rural community. I think it’s going to be a pretty big deal when you can have imaging overlaid on your target anatomy.”

Sharp HealthCare’s Dr. Korn is thinking even more broadly. “We know [the Vision Pro] is probably going to be great for surgery, precision, and analysis,” he says. “But gosh, I’ve already seen people using this for mental illness and meditation. People using the Kung Fu Panda app to help do Tai Chi. But also, doctors think, ‘hey, maybe we could use that for anesthesia, for patients, for children before they go into surgery.’ You’re seeing all these verticals coming in.”

For all the healthcare apps that emerged during the Vision Pro’s first year, the what-ifs abound—and the summit at Sharp’s spatial computing center is about turning them into progress.

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