From prototype to real healthcare environments in Spain
Metaskills and MetaMedicsVR tested AI-assisted soft-skills training across Spanish universities and hospitals, to understand what it takes to deploy communication simulations in real healthcare.
117 participants • 5 pilot sites • 25 interviews • 5 co-creation workshops • 6-month project
The pilot in numbers
Across five pilot sites in Spain, October 2025 - March 2026.
Universities in Málaga, Granada and Comillas; hospitals in Antequera and Málaga.
From the first university session to the closing hospital pilot.
Average from post-session surveys - not a score from all 117 participants.
The challenge
Would institutions adopt it at all?
The open question was not whether the technology worked, but whether hospitals and universities would accept AI-assisted communication training inside their existing programmes.
Technical constraints
Hospital Wi-Fi, whitelisting and approval for VR devices - the things that decide whether a pilot starts on time or not at all.
Operational reality
Device management, hygiene between users, scheduling around clinical shifts and supervision during sessions.
Co-creation with clinicians, educators and training leads
25 interviews
MetaMedicsVR ran 25 semi-structured interviews at the partner institutions, with clinicians, educators, healthcare trainers, simulation leads, training managers and innovation managers.
5 co-creation workshops
Five workshops worked through what the interviews surfaced: gaps in current training, integration challenges and cultural expectations around soft skills training.
Expert testing and focus groups
Separate expert testing sessions and clinician focus groups in October 2025 added qualitative feedback on how credible the scenarios felt.
Where we tested
University · web
University of Málaga
Phase 1: browser-based access, individual unsupervised sessions - technical feasibility and baseline feedback.
University · web
University of Granada
Phase 1: undergraduate and postgraduate healthcare students working through communication scenarios.
Hospital · VR
Antequera Hospital
Phase 2: smaller supervised VR groups, with pre- and post-session surveys.
Hospital · VR
Materno Hospital, Málaga
Phase 2: hospital pilot with the highest reported rating of the project - 4.43/5.
University · web + VR
San Juan de Dios Comillas
Additional site covering both web and VR delivery.
How it was deployed
Phase 1 · universities
Web-based, individual sessions
Students worked through scenarios in the browser. The goal was technical feasibility and a baseline of how clinicians-in-training respond to an AI counterpart.
Phase 2 · hospitals
Supervised VR groups
Smaller groups in hospitals, with supervision, pre- and post-session surveys and qualitative feedback from staff.
Oct 2025 - Mar 2026
Six-month project
The full run from first university session to the closing hospital pilot.
What we learned
Result
Post-training ratings 4.03-4.28 out of 5
Post-session surveys averaged 4.03/5 for comfort, 4.14/5 for usefulness, 4.21/5 for recommendation and 4.28/5 overall. These are averages from the participants who filled in the surveys, not from all 117 - survey coverage differed between sites, and San Juan de Dios Comillas was assessed qualitatively. By site: Antequera 4.23/5 (post-session, n=22) and Materno in Málaga 4.43/5 (n=7).
Result
Demand for more scenarios
Participants asked for wider coverage, particularly psychiatry and mental health scenarios.
Insight
Integration, not a demo
Institutions expected the training to sit inside structured programmes, not to be a one-off technology showcase.
Lesson
Localisation is clinical, not linguistic
Translating a scenario is the easy part. Clinical context, terminology and cultural expectations around difficult conversations differ between countries.
Want to start in a similar way? Design your own pilot.
Design a pilotThinking about a pilot in your own institution?
We can walk you through what worked in Spain, what did not, and what your IT and clinical teams would need to agree on first. The project ran from October 2025 to March 2026 with 117 participants across five pilot sites.