Based off of the article: The Gamification of Healthcare: Emergence of the Digital Practitioner?
Zealic's Cliff Notes
"People enjoy playing games and winning." Today companies are working on developing applications and software to work with interventional strategies and gamification elements in order to impact irrational and unhealthy human behavior. These behaviors include:
Sedentary lifestyle
Obesity
Smoking
Recreational drug abuse
Excessive alcohol consumption
Nonadherence to prescribed medical treatments
Some of these applications allow patients to compete with themselves by working towards personal goals and high scores. In other applications patients can compete with each other.
Regulatory Framework
The FDA recognizes these software programs in healthcare as medical devices and considers them as "software as a medical device." The 21st Century Cures Act clarifies what software is required to be regulated as a medical device. Programs that maintain or encourage behavior and do not attempt to diagnose, cure, mitigate, prevent, or treat the disease or condition are exempt from regulation.
Practitioner Interventions
Noncompliance and nonadherance are issues in the healthcare industry. A lot of diseases could be avoided or halted by patients if they exhibited the proper behavior for combatting those diseases. This can be influenced through a game application. Patients could learn and track what they need to in order to manage their health and physicians can also monitor how the patient is doing.
The Path Forward
"A 2-way gaming interface that could permit the digital practitioner to monitor the progress of the patient, address any deficiencies that might be noted, and adjust the game accordingly."
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Source:
AJMC
Originally Written by: Eli G. Phillips Jr, PharmD, JD; Chadi Nabhan, MD, MBA; and Bruce A. Feinberg, DO