Digital Health Needs More Gamification — Here’s Why

There are only so many ways you can remind a patient to take their medication, or to do their physical therapy exercises.

It’s a question that every doctor, insurer, and health care provider asks themselves: “How do we get our patients to do what we need them to do in order to recover faster or live a healthier life?”

Rewards act as carrots, moving a user (patient) along an otherwise cumbersome journey of, say, physical therapy exercises. And studies have been proving that it works for a while now.

For quite a while now, gamification in healthcare has been seen as a viable, and even enjoyable, solution. Gamification is this idea that what drives people’s behavior is accomplishment, motivating users with the promise of everything from titles, badges, exclusive access to certain privileges, and even cash. These rewards act as carrots, moving a user (patient) along an otherwise cumbersome journey of, say, physical therapy exercises. And studies have been proving that it works for a while now.

According to an article on healthcare gamification, one powerful game that was invented back in 1997 was able to help children manage their diabetes, reducing the amount of kids admitted to urgent care by 77 percent. More recently, in 2012, Aetna adopted a gamification platform, Mindbloom’s Life Game, with the hopes of increasing the healthy habits of their customers — and they did, by close to 50%. Aetna saw members using the site 4 times per week, with an average of 14 minutes and 41 seconds spent on each visit.

But gamification is not just a patient- or consumer-focused solution. It is also proving to be effective in training employees of major healthcare companies and improving their performance metrics. AstraZeneca, for example, added gamification elements to their training programs with the intention of teaching 500 agents about new medicines. The gamified platform saw a 97% participation rate and a 99% completion rate, with most of the agents using the platform outside of regular work hours (how often does that happen?).

What we’re seeing across all sectors of digital health, however, is that it’s not money or financial rewards that motivate users, but emotion. And where gamification tends to separate itself from “pointsification” platforms, where users are simply rewarded on their own, gamification involves some sort of competition against others.

The Hurdles For Gamification Adoption

This is a space I am particularly interested in because I’m a firm believer of both patient engagement and patient empowerment, both of which can be improved through digital platforms with gamification elements. When dealing with a chronic illness or pain, diabetes being a great example, a digital health platform needs to engage a user on a daily basis, and keep them emotionally involved over the long term.

The issue standing in the way of mainstream gamification adoption within the digital health space, though, is that the people trying to solve the problems are not necessarily the people dealing with those problems on a day-to-day basis. The general population of patients who have diabetes aren’t the ones building these platforms — it’s either C-level executives pushing to create a digital solution for a population they don’t truly understand or know, or it’s startup entrepreneurs who are often unaware of the true population characteristics, trying to ‘sell’ their product to the C-suite.

It’s interesting that even with all of this positive data surrounding gamification it really hasn’t been uniformly accepted within healthcare, and I believe that’s because many executives and healthcare providers and leaders don’t value it. Honestly, this is the reason why, as a practicing surgeon, I decided to build my own platform called Pulse, not just for my own patients, but for all doctors, hospitals, and healthcare providers looking to improve the patient recovery. These are issues I see on a daily basis.

I don’t see tech as a replacement to health care. I see it as a conduit.

Because at the end of the day, patients are consumers. In the same way that Coca Cola has to sit there and question what is going to motivate someone to drink their soda, we as healthcare professionals have to think hard about what is going to motivate a patient to stop drinking soda, or to do their exercises, or to take their medication. There is plenty of evidence to support that patients are motivated by gamified elements. The question is how to continue improving upon those findings, so much so that we can see the needle really move toward higher success rates all across the industry.

Something that we are thinking about a lot with Pulse is the long-term engagement of a patient. Take the diabetes example. There are obvious benefits of giving users points and badges for using the app and accomplishing certain tasks, but there should also be an education element that informs users, “Your glucose control over the last month has reduced your risk of losing your eyesight by 10 percent,” for example. These are the metrics that are really going to motivate a patient to stick with a digital health platform, and, if anything, make it an even higher priority in their daily lives. So it starts with gamification, and continues with true education and tangible change.

There is nothing more motivating than knowing your health is improving in real time.