Tech & Innovation in Healthcare

Question: As a physician and a video game enthusiast, I love the idea of gamification to encourage better compliance with our patients.

Do you have other examples of gamification in healthcare?

Pennsylvania Subscriber

Answer: Gamification is the process of applying video game-like components to real-world tasks. For example, you can unlock achievements or badges in a fitness tracker’s app by reaching a certain number of steps in a given week. In healthcare, gamification is a great method for engaging your patients, helping them feel more involved in their care, and promote healthy behaviors.

A recent example of using gamification in healthcare involves the company Hello Heart. At the end of February, the digital health coaching platform released the My Meds feature, which is a virtual pillbox that aims to help users take control of their health and build good habits.

More than 100,000 U.S. patients use the Hello Heart app to manage their cardiovascular health, and the new feature is designed to help encourage medication adherence and promote fun and sustainable lifestyle choices.

“Medication adherence is unusually low when it comes to heart disease. Because you can’t see or feel heart disease risk factors like high cholesterol and blood pressure, you can’t feel if the meds you are taking are helping them or not, which leads many people to just skip them and ignore the problem,” said Maayan Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Hello Heart in a press release. “My Meds is a first-of-its-kind digitally innovative solution that could greatly bolster medication adherence for patients with heart disease,” Cohen continued.

Check out past issues of Tech & Innovation in Healthcare to learn more about gamification in healthcare.