David Hananel
Assistant Teaching Professor, Division of Healthcare Simulation Science
Director, Center for Research in Education and Simulation Technologies (CREST)
David Hananel joined the UW Department of Surgery together with a number of his colleagues from the University of Minnesota, when Dr. Robert Sweet received an offer they could not refuse to move his lab, the Center for Research in Simulation and Education Technologies (CREST) to Seattle. He has been with CREST now for 9 years, most of it as Director, and now also as Lecturer in the newly formed Division of Healthcare Simulation Science that brings together CREST with the WWAMI Institute for Simulation in Healthcare (WISH) under the Leadership of Dr. Sweet.
Mr. Hananel was born in Istanbul Turkey, where he finished a German High School. From there he moved to Berlin, at the time in West Germany, to study Electrical Engineering and then came to the US to continue his studies in Computer Science.
Mr. Hananel has been deeply involved in healthcare simulation since its early years, going back over 25 years when he was working in device development for Minimally Invasive Surgical procedures in Cincinnati in the 90’s. Some of the projects he was involved in raised the question of retraining surgeons when the use of new technology required skills significantly different from what they were trained in. At the time the only training opportunity was with porcine cases. The questions raised set him on a path that eventually led him to sell his part of the engineering company to his partners and join a Swedish company that with government funding was working on a Virtual Reality (VR) platform for arthroscopic shoulder surgery.
Shortly after his introduction to the VR platform, recognizing the need to wrap educational content around what otherwise would be an interesting game to play, he convinced Dr. Ajit Sachdeva, at the time at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia to visit the engineering team in Sweden and give a series of lectures on adult education principles and educational design methodologies. The result of this encounter is the now standard outline for medical simulator content, following sound educational principles seen on many commercial products.
Mr. Hananel went on to work for many of the Healthcare Simulation companies in various roles, as President of the US operations, as Director Surgical Products, staying involved with and managing the development of many innovative products, always collaborating with Academic Medicine as a source of inspiration and direction. During those years he met Dr. Sweet, at the time a Resident at the University of Washington, and their many discussions led to a desire to collaborate. The opportunity arose in 2011 when he joined CREST as Associate Program Director.
The reason to switch from industry to academia was two-fold: to gain access to government research funds to push state-of-the art in simulation further, faster and to start establishing the science of healthcare simulation and train others in the field. That desire for research funds became reality when CREST expanded a working relationship on a largescale study with the DoD to a number of ongoing projects for the team that followed them to UW.
A series of smaller projects opened up the door to one of the most significant development projects in healthcare simulation to date: the Advanced Modular Manikin. This 5-year effort that started in Minneapolis and was finished at UW, with Dr. Sweet as the PI and Mr. Hananel as the Systems Architect and the PI for UW resulted in a first of its kind modular, distributed, interoperable platform for healthcare simulation. It resulted in a set of open standards, and work funded by the DoD has been published as open source, so that any interested party can build upon the platform and create new simulation products based on this effort at no cost to them.
With the successful completion of the AMM program, Mr. Hananel is now looking forward to the next few projects for CREST, targeting many levels of care ranging from First Responders to Rural Surgeons. In addition to that, Mr. Hananel is working on pulling together the curricula for the new Division towards a Master’s Degree in Healthcare Simulation Science and building the first few courses that will be offered, in the process reaching out to faculty members across the campus. Finally, this year he was named Chair of the Technologies and Simulation Committee for the American College of Surgeons - Accredited Education Institutes (ACS-AEI) and was inducted into the ACS Academy of Master Surgeon Educators as an affiliate member.
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