SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
The Hologram Doctor Will See You Now
Tennessee cancer clinic beams doctors out to rural areas, a new model of telehealth. ::
BY ISABELLE BOUSQUETTE L
ast year, some cancer patients in tennessee and Mississippi got a startling offer: Instead of videoconferencing with oncology specialists located hours away, they could see a
hologram doctor, courtesy of the same special effects that have projected the Jonas Brothers and other celebrities at concerts and live events. The offer came from the West Cancer Center &
Research Institute, a health system that employs about 61 doctors and serves about 19,240 new patients a year across 12 locations in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The system’s main clinic is in Germantown, Tennessee,
a suburb of Memphis. Its doctors typically spend hours on the road each week
getting to the satellite clinics to see patients in more rural locations, while also relying heavily on videoconferencing for check-ins. Now, however, two of those clinics are replacing the
video calls with life-size hologram-like displays, part of a cross-industry push to take videoconferencing to the next level. “You get my body language, my hand motions, there’s expression that is able to be conveyed, which as you can
imagine in an oncology visit is very important,” said Dr. Sylvia Richey, chief medical officer and medical oncologist at West Cancer Center. “You’re not pixelated. There aren’t crazy parts of your
body missing,” she said. “It’s really amazing.” The setup works like this: Doctors are beamed from a
small production studio in the Germantown clinic and appear in life-size boxes in designated exam rooms at the satellite clinics. The boxes are fronted with a flat, clear 4K LCD screen,
and a specialized lighting setup inside gives the flat image an appearance of three-dimensionality. Patients, however, aren’t being projected as holograms
to the doctors. In the clinics, they communicate via camera — an intentional choice, Richey said, to give the patient, rather than the doctor, the more realistic experience. “I can see the patient well enough to recognize a
rash or a lump or a problem. I can’t feel everything. But oftentimes, that’s all we need,” Richey said. The hardware and software are provided by Proto
Hologram, a Los Angeles-based startup known for creating holograms at concerts, corporate conferences, and other live events. Proto has beamed everyone from the Jonas Brothers to
MrBeast, Paris Hilton, and Antonio Neri, chief of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The technology has been slowly developing ever since
the spectral appearance of Tupac Shakur in hologram form on a Coachella stage in 2012. Broadly, it is still mostly limited to one-off gimmicks
rather than used as a daily communication tool, said analyst Tuong Nguyen. As a communications medium, he said, it faces a
similar dilemma to that of augmented and virtual reality: While it may be better than videoconferencing, is it a big enough leap to justify the cost? Proto thinks so.
The price of the box was
recently lowered to $29,000 from $65,000, thanks to some efficiencies on the manufacturing side. The software that powers the projections is included free for the first year and then costs $5,000 a year going forward. Proto is also working with Indigenous Pact, a Native American healthcare service, which has bought several of the units and plans to put them in new clinics, with the first one opening later this year in Northern California.
72 NEWSMAX MAXLIFE | JUNE 2025
PROTO INC.
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