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In the months after Perficient published a whitepaper on Gamification, the interest from our readers has been gratifying and it seems to be time for a follow-up to that interest. Business gamification is the use of game mechanics and user interfaces in business software. What are the practical uses of gamification in a healthcare workplace? Here is a fresh look beyond the well-known fitness and wellness applications:
Agile project management for implementing EMRs
- Training staff on new documentation requirements for ICD-10
- Maintaining a high level of commitment to quality measures and patient safety
Agile project management
Most healthcare organizations are in the grip of too many projects and desperately need a way to streamline project management and keep project team members highly engaged. If that is your situation, then check out www.redcrittertracker.com and their Agile Project Management that uses badges, rewards leaderboards and real-time Twitter feeds to drive a “what’s next” methodology. This innovative software uses gaming elements including fifty unique badges that can be unlocked by meeting project goals and deadlines. Completing key milestones in a project can earn a participant Reward Points that can be cashed in for gift cards or lunches with executives. Red Critter Tracker uses a drag and drop user interface that should improve project management updates as well. Red Critter has been developed for multiple team management, traditional time tracking and effort estimation and real-time team messaging. Most EMR implementations that span multiple institutions need easy to use and yet powerful project management tool that can coordinate communications in a simple To Do style view.
Staff Training on ICD-10 Documentation
Forbes recently named Badgeville (www.badgeville.com) “America’s Most Promising Company.” Badgeville views gamification as a modern business strategy that uses proven techniques from social gaming to measure and influence behavior. They believe their techniques can be applied across virtually any user experience where increasing specific behaviors add value to a business or organization. Using advanced gamification techniques, such as levels, missions, and tracks, Badgeville clients experience 20 to more than 200 increases in key business objectives. Their “Behavior Platform” appears to be just what the doctor ordered for the big cultural shift required in tougher documentation standards required to justify ICD-10 codes used for billing in healthcare. The mission would be to meet or exceed the required standards and language for ICD-10 for each key medical procedure and gamification could manage the improvement through levels for key medical professionals. The game elements could make the learning process more interesting, possibly playful and morale-boosting rather than intrusive for already busy people. (more…)
Just as healthcare organizations began to grapple with the famous integration of in-patient and out-patients for 
Using ICPA, healthcare organizations can delve into their own patient diagnostic and treatment records, clinical policies, medical literature and other sources of qualified information in ways they never thought possible. One key example is the work currently underway at Texas-based Seton Healthcare to help increase the survival rate of congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. Studies have shown that proactive treatment of CHF patients can help prevent the readmission rates on those types of patients. Seton Healthcare is using the Content and Predictive Analytics solution to analyze patient data to determine the high-risk patients who would benefit from interventions. The project mines the unstructured data of patient records, developing predictive models to determine the potential for readmissions, applying that knowledge then to improve outcomes and reduce costs. With the increased pressure to reduce readmissions and costs, this predictive analytics approach is very timely for the proactive healthcare organization.
One of the questions that I get asked frequently about mobile healthcare applications is “What can we do to make physicians, patients, or plan members ‘lock in’ to our organization?” When I hear this question I immediately think of the concept of stickiness. The concept of the stickiness factor comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s book called The Tipping Point and it is explained as an approximation of churn – the secret sauce that helps an organization understand their customer’s lifetime value and maximize revenues. According to Gladwell, there is a simple way to package information that under the right circumstances can make it irresistible; all you have to do is find it. One of the clever ways that Angry Birds gets this stickiness factor is to package the game play for easy starts and stops. One round only takes a few minutes – win or lose. The game player can start and finish a game while waiting on their lunch to heat in the microwave. The take-away is that user experience makes a big difference in stickiness to keep them coming back.
…Real-time analytics, that is.
