How Treating Healthcare Like a Game Can Save Lives

Gamification can be difficult to achieve in the long run, however, as pointed out by Frank Lee, leader of “Serious Games for Health”. It’s hard to get patients hooked on a game, it’s not just about nice graphic and earning virtual trophies, even financial (dis)incentives stop working after a while. For example, a daycare started fining parents who were late for pick-up, but the number of offences doubled as parents saw this as paying a few for an extra service. The same applies to penalizing patients for smoking, they may wonder if the pleasure of smoking is really worth the $20 and it might be. A Gartner study found that 80% of apps that aim to gamify healthcare would disappear due to poor design (Rubin). These apps are tricky enough to make accurate, and when traditional incentives don’t work and game requirements are so high, the likelihood of a gamification of healthcare begins to diminish. The potential gamified healthcare apps have though may be enough to outweigh all the negativity of failed apps along the way.

Accenture reported seven key gamification elements: status, milestones, competition, rankings, social connectedness, immersion reality and personalization. Dr. Joseph Kim, a physician technologist, believes that applying this to healthcare can lead patients to be more curious about their condition, medications, and eventually self-care. Patients use role-playing games and see what happens if they do not adequately manage their conditions. This will hopefully kick start individuals and encourage them to set goals, measure their progress, reach milestones, and compare their performance to benchmarks; all elements of gamification. Gamification will also motivate patients to receive ongoing feedback, reminders, and status updates about their progress. Gamification can save lives, especially those of children (see On Alert for Pain story). Overall, gamification leads to more actively engaged and healthy patients and this is just the beginning of how gamification is shaking up the delivery of healthcare (Kim).

Source: SearchHealthIT "Gamification in healthcare isn't just about playing games" and US News "The Health Benefits of Gamification"